The Ordeal of Bitter Fruit
by Antje
Summary: As Glitch, DG and Wyatt prepare for the annual harvest festival, they find the twisted and bitter fruits of their friendship might be salvageable if they can hold on to each other. G/DG/W
1. As the Crow Flies

**Characters/Ship**: Wyatt/DG/Glitch, and Raw might be about sometimes, but it's primarily C/D/G  
**Summary**: Early autumn brings DG and Glitch to Wyatt's strange little house, blessed with a romantic history and a magical little orchard. As the three friends prepare for the annual harvest festival, they find the twisted and bitter fruits of their friendship might be salvageable if they can hold on to each other.  
**Note**: Takes place after "Lilies to Tread." ... The same as it appeared when first written in 2008, although all these years later I'd like to edit it, but I won't.

-x-

1.

**As the Crow Flies**

-x-

It had been quite a long while since DG stooped neck and shoulders over a piece of luggage. One piece of luggage, that was all she needed, from corner to corner, as long as the flap latched, one piece of luggage was all she needed. Twenty minutes before, the mess of clothes atop the bed were in neat stacks. Sifting through them while on the prowl for a particular blouse, and then tossing an article from the carpet confines, and doing this far too often, brought swift disorder. She knew where everything was. She knew what was in the bag. Whatever was left behind would not be without her for too long.

She hardly ever got away. She hardly ever got a chance.

She hardly ever wanted to.

-x-

In the first year of her return, she'd learned the seasons. She spent long hours on the patios or in the gardens of all her family's homes. The change was not so much visual as it was an internal whisper, a congruent sense of time within the realm and within herself. The first time she felt that connection, tears dropped from her eyes; she was herself, brought to herself, brought home from a place none had wanted her to be.

And this late September of her second year, the intuition caressed internally, and the right moment came to announce to Mother and Dad that she was leaving the Northern Island for Finaqua, and would see them at the waters anon. Mother wrote to her daughter a few days later, and in print described the newly fallen snow, the blaze of the white of the mountains against the brilliance of the sky, but DG was not sorry she had missed it. Snow rarely fell in Kansas, she recalled the cold fluff of one frozen winter's day, and recalled it without fondness. The Northern Palace was equinoctial. Finaqua was solstitial.

Finaqua bestowed blessings of temperate silence and whispering rain. The staff were quiet mice who ducked into their mouse holes whenever she walked by, who bowed and obeyed without a twitch of whisker and scampered off joyfully as if to play. They were barely known by face, very few of them by name; rather she knew their identities through their tattles, their tails, the work they did. They were busier than ever: the palace had to be readied for enclosing date of the Queen's arrival.

DG kept busy herself, but it was not for far and distant travel that she had emptied wardrobes and chosen the plainest clothes. Finaqua was lonely, of lowlands and shallow crevices of water, of wispy grasses and a faraway gloom on the sides of drowsy mountains. All the wildlife in the surrounding landscape could not soothe the eagerness to be with her friends again.

By eleven in the morning, an unaccountable weekday like so many others, she and the carpetbag were fast friends. Side by side they sat on a stone bench carved with grapes and vines of a fictitious size. The leaves of deciduous trees, she had learned their names by now, were dusty at the edges in all the typical colours of an autumn gradually descending. Against the muddy service road, from barns to kitchens and to the nearest town beyond the fens, the reverberation of a vehicle propped her to booted feet, and the carpetbag went with her. There was no family to say goodbye to, no quick and painless farewell ripped from her like an adhesive bandage. Only a glance over the shoulder, a twinkle of an eye, the upward tilt of a mouth suggesting unsaid words of departure glee and no sketch of remorse.

She knew the driver, and he knew her, but he was business and it showed. In the back of the car, the fresh air coming in through cracked windows and ceiling, perfumed a bit by the tiny herbal buds tucked in vases beside the ceiling handles, DG gave what concentration she could to maps and articles and the outlines of nature essays she planned to pen, "oh someday". The run of trees turned more to pine and less to leaves, and the air dried as elevation was breached. She knew the road, knew its master Persephone, perpetual spring, where dragonflies always flew and birdsong reigned.

A crimson gash bloomed from the trunks and the green. It bobbed in time, with ebony steps, atop an obsidian tangle, and led itself into the dusty verge as the tires crackled pebbles in approach. DG did not have to ask the driver to halt: it was done. The door swung outward with a push of an arm, smiles exchanged, and quiet greetings given. The driver blessed the boot with two more light bags, and he manoeuvred slowly, slow enough for the exchange of an embrace in the backseat, for the touch of mouths and the twisting of fingers about each other. Glitch said a few words about the condition of the road he'd travelled, how pleasant a morning it had been when he'd left the palace. He pinched her chin and congratulated her on the expertise with which she had developed the plan, and kissed her again because she hadn't forgotten her last piece of luggage, him, waiting in the spray of asters and goldenrod along the side of the road. They hadn't wanted to be seen leaving the palace together. The palace mice talked, he said, and the less they talked about Master Ambrose and Princess DG, the smoother the household flowed, and the more they pretended their secret was safe from the world. But after two years of love in the shadows, the rules were known well, and flawlessly dispensed.

This was the first holiday they had ever planned to take together. To the chagrin of the one they visited, it had taken them three weeks to coordinate the schemes, and only twenty minutes of packing, two hours of walking, a half-hour of driving, to execute it. Wyatt had wanted them as guests nearly a month before, yet assured them, in his last hastily-written note, that the date was always open: _Come when you can_.

Glitch tilted forward to hand a primitive map to the driver. He leaned back and cuddled an arm around DG's shoulders, her hand at his knee. She remembered the map, half in photographic memory, half in ideal, the line through the mountains, drawn straight when she knew there would be squiggles, to an "O" and an "X", one being Wyatt's village, one being Wyatt's house.

_It's fifteen spans,_ so Wyatt penned in one map corner, _from the palace, as the crow flies._

DG decided crows fly swift and hale.


	2. No Rhyme or Reason

2.

**No Rhyme Or Reason**

-x-

Setting out on his own some time after the Eclipse, Wyatt had one direction of travel: "Far from where I've been." He would not return to old haunts at the hems of old woods, for some ancient things of the heart never fade. He would not be where he had been, and where he had seen his family play.

First he travelled east, and for six months was a rancher's hand. By an old friend of the Resistance, he'd been invited to join the largest cattle drive in all the realms; and for three months that was his salvation. He wrote DG and Glitch letters describing the sights passed before him, and transcribed that it was "pretty simple on the mind being among cows and steers after all we went through, and the men aren't much for talking, which suits me fine." He wrote to Jeb epigrammatic descriptions of landscapes and visual impressions of all he saw. He wrote letters to himself, sent them to the postal bureau down in the western hillside town he thought he'd be settling in.

DG shrugged her shoulder, to wake up a dozing Glitch, as the big, burly town sign, made of roughly hewn pine tree logs, passed outside the car window. Ashers Falls, spans and spans from fair grasslands roamed, from cows whose solemn faces and destiny helped heal the wounds of shock and grief. After the cattle drive, Wyatt wandered again, relieved of all significant sense of duty, and found odd jobs—odd jobs that found him by accident first, by intention second. Nearly three months ago, he'd walked into Ashers Falls to remain indefinitely, and he'd collected his mail, the letters he sent to himself, at the postal bureau. Tucked into the woods at the trickling feet of Ashers Creek, Wyatt left his rucksack on the unfinished porch of the unfinished home as he unlocked the door…

The porch was a finished object now, the wrap-around sort from front to back, and magnificently tiered: a narrow staircase on one side adjoining an intimate balcony from a room practically in the rafters to the casual side entrance. Wyatt heard the car approach, heard the noises of doors opening and closing. A screen door slammed shut somewhere, later they discovered it was in the front of the house, and heavy steps thundered across the dewy grass still deep in tall, cool shadows.

A greeting was an incoherent but joyous tumble of vowel sounds as Wyatt approached. His arms opened wide, wide as his smile, and he scooped up DG, tiny and wispy as a reed, and twirled her about. She hugged Wyatt's thick neck until her arms were sore, felt a kiss in her hair as she fell back to earth. While Wyatt did not exactly twirl Glitch, there was a bear hug, a lift so that Glitch's toes were off the ground, and a gentle descent. The happiness did not end there, an ill-contained aggressor that brought Wyatt to holding DG's cheek with one hand, and Glitch's neck with the other. A suggestive tug and they hugged again, but it was softer than before, and a solemn sort of tension rose, unspoken yet felt even as they disconnected.

DG found that the luggage had already been removed from the trunk, to the dirt drive, and into the house. The driver bowed to her. She thanked him with a casual "See you later," whenever the later came, whenever she requested a pick-up, and he departed.

But it was not he that had stolen the luggage and placed it inside. An industrious slip of a caramel-coloured shadow curved along the trees. And then there were two. One shadow walked upright, with pale maple syrup eyes; the other was a quadruped, furry like its companion, though furrier, of black and grey and silver, irises of yellow and taciturn of spirit. Raw hung back from the new arrivals until DG brought him round to a cosy embrace. He had arrived the morning before, he said. He never stayed very far from Ashers Falls, being of the sort who preferred aloneness, but came to Wyatt's every so often, to help with tasks, to visit with friends. Among them now was the silvery dog, and while Glitch assimilated how very apt it was for Wyatt to have a dog, he nonetheless stepped away in retreat.

"Wyatt, that's a wolf."

Wyatt reached over and petted the wolf's grizzly neck ruff. "So she is."

"Chimtu," said Raw, and they could not quite believe it but he almost smiled.

"Bless you," Glitch offered. "Didn't know you had a cold, Raw. What?" This to DG, who'd hit him limply. Then he glanced at the wolf. "Oh, Chimtu. I see, that's its name. How cute. Is it a sneeze or a name? Well, who can tell!"

"Dare we ask why you have a wolf?" DG ventured. Wyatt sloshed through indecision while DG knelt to introduce herself. Chimtu inched forward, black leathery nose licked before giving DG a good sniff. And when she walked, her right paw showed a mild limp.

The story of the wolf, Wyatt decided, should be told with precision. "I got her from old Meria Maddigan. She lives on up in the hills. Not too far from Raw's place."

A slow rumble emerged from the hirsute viewer. Glitch's eyebrows went up.

"Don't you like her as your neighbour? I can imagine she's the sort that's trying to get you to adopt a lot of weird animals. Like—frogs and chickens and," he glanced uncertainly at Chimtu, "wolves."

"Bad… with stews," averred Raw, wringing his hands and looking around, as though afraid his neighbour would leap from the underbrush and lash him for this remark. "Can't cook at all. Smells terrible." He waved a hand in front of his sensitive nose to pantomime the atrocity.

"So her gastronomy proficiencies are a little off. Think she's the only one who doesn't know her way around the kitchen?" He held up one hand vertically, and pointed to DG with the other, hidden from her sight. She was fixed on Chimtu all the same. Glitch shrugged and glared at Wyatt for the rest of the tale. "So, is that all? Bad chef from the hills brings you a wolf and that's all we get?"

"She's a witch," Wyatt abruptly remarked.

DG shot up from the ground. "A witch?"

"Bad cook," grumbled Raw in the background. "Good witch."

"She's a good sort of witch." Wyatt flashed a brief but genuine smile. Glitch laughed in a trilling decrescendo. DG shared little amusement in the matter. She found her shoulder gripped in Wyatt's hand. "Witch Maddigan is harmless. She found Chimtu caught in an old abandoned trap out in the woods, fixed her up, and brought her down to me. Said our spirits were kindred, that we needed each other."

Glitch moved, hand extended, for Chimtu to survey his many beguiling scents. Cautious of this, DG laid guiding fingers at the martingale of his crimson greatcoat, and winced as Chimtu leapt to her paws. The outstretched fingers were saturated with licks, and Glitch smiled, DG relaxed, Wyatt rolled his eyes, and Raw nodded sagely. Glitch wasn't exactly fond of animals, particularly beasts not bred for domesticity, but they were excessively fond of him.

"You should get to know me, little one," Glitch spoke to Chimtu, slobbering all over his textile finery, "since we're staying awhile."

"Did you want us here for a specific reason, Wyatt?" DG brought the question forth plainly. "I know you said in your letters that we should come any time, but—with Raw here… Is something going on?"

"No rhyme or reason for it, DG." But he committed an open gesture to the back of his property, a space of trees set apart at exact distances, surround by taller poplars and birches. The area was recognised as the orchard he'd written about in their epistles. "Never had anyone tending to it this whole last growing season, but it's still got some fruit that needs hauling in."

"Canning," added Raw.

"Canning!" Glitch repeated enthusiastically.

"Canning?" The princess groaned and her shoulders slackened. "Well, I won't be able to help with that. You guys know what I'm like in the kitchen…"

"What? Don't be silly," consoled Glitch with a rub here and a kiss dropped at her temple. "You're the worst—best!—sorry, I meant best—popper of popcorn that ever wore a tiara. I meant best. Really! I did! Didn't I, Wyatt? Raw?"

Both men deigned to nod before Wyatt continued.

"Anyway, Deege, you won't have to do that part. I'll be doing that part, more or less."

The snort from Glitch showered derision. Wyatt narrowed his eyes momentarily but chose not to defend himself.

"Fine." DG couldn't believe that spending time outdoors, in the peaceful orchard, was such a waste of the last few days of autumn warmth. "I'll do the picking and the hauling—we can assign chores later, if that's what you want to do. Why not just let the fruit rot? What will it matter if you miss a season?"

Wyatt turned about to pilot them into the homestead, a strange structure that neither DG nor Glitch had ever seen, had only heard about in letters. They followed him obediently, curiously, with Raw and Chimtu steps behind.

"I'll tell you why tomorrow," Wyatt said.

Glitch and DG eyed one another, then Wyatt. A definite intonation of obscurity was in his voice. It would take them nearly the whole month to decipher all the riddles he expressed on the stage of a south-western harvest.


	3. Changing Horses Midstream

3.

**Changing Horses Midstream**

-x-

All that morning, before his guests arrived, Wyatt had been over the house with the finest of fine-toothed combs, with the most critical of eyes, to be certain it was as comfortable, as clean, and as regal in appearance as a place of that sort would ever get. He knew his home would both seem and feel unnatural and limited to two who were used to the gilt and finery of palaces. Out of nerves, Wyatt stooped to pinch the pale scale of a pine cone from the area rug just as he showed them into the alcove. It was not a hallway, exactly, but a wall, cut at a funny angle, between two rooms built below the upstairs loft. He dared not call it a hallway, a corridor, or anything to suggest the house had anywhere but the next corner to go—and so he called it the alcove. One room was an oversized bath, elegantly and masterfully tiled, with a blank sheet of white plaster extending from one end to the next.

"I thought you might like to paint a mural on that wall, DG," explained Wyatt, watching her blue eyes widen, then see the light in them dim. "But don't feel like you have to."

She flickered a hesitant gaze across him, then back to the bath. She said nothing. Glitch, standing between them, encouraged her with a surreptitious elbow. Her immobile tongue was not fast enough for Wyatt's accidental self-protection.

"This place isn't what the two of you are used to," he started, feeling this should be expressed to limit misunderstanding and extol humility, "and I'm not trying to make it seem like it's something it's not and will never be."

DG gave a shake of her head. "It's not that, Wyatt." A frown peeled away to the revelries of a feminine grin. "It's just—more than I was expecting, actually. I was thinking outhouse, hole in the ground, that sort of thing. Sorry," she snapped, feeling her cheeks burn.

"Don't apologise." He felt as silly as she did. "Never apologise for any time I might exceed your expectations. That goes for you, too."

Glitch nodded vaguely, still eyeing the bath as one lost in wonder. "Oh, absolutely, Wyatt. Expectations. Apologising. Got it."

The front of his coat grabbed in a wide hand, Glitch found himself facing a room with multiple windows, a set of doors to a shale patio nestled in the nook of the woods' arboraceous hold; a room that felt like it was part of the outdoors itself, with its walls and floors of timber, green in the colour scheme, the chirping of birds and lift of the wind through the screens. A series of three bags were tucked neatly against the footboard, including DG's old carpetbag, looking as though it had wandered in all on its own.

Wyatt turned from the place with a pat at Glitch's chest. "You two can have this room."

"But we don't need—" Glitch shushed his argument beneath the steady glare.

Wyatt anticipated DG's reaction, though he waited patiently for her to speak it all the same.

"How did you know?" Her tone wavered in confusion, but it was the hand placed at her hip that demanded an answer. "We never told you."

"We meant to," intervened Glitch, "as soon as we got here. It's not exactly the thing one can really write in a letter. Wouldn't that be—awkward."

In the silence following Glitch's statement, Wyatt glanced between them, wondering when the time would come when they would laugh about it—or if a time came at all that they would laugh together. They never really had…

But it was as Glitch said. "Some knowledge can't be learned through words." He left them, intending them to follow, but Glitch and DG lingered. She shrugged her shoulders, and Glitch looked beguiled. And as they continued with the tour they waited, too, without knowing it, for the laughter they had missed.

Raw had herbal tea set out by the time each room had been surveyed and loftily praised. The afternoon sun turned more golden in the sky, more emerald against the remaining leaves in the underbrush, and a mist of purple reigned over the near and distant hills. There were smiles, soft and fleeting things, gentle as fawns in a glade—but not a chortle among them.

"I don't remember you mentioning how this property came to be yours." DG brought the subject to light as she noticed the canopy of trees so close, and in the silence between rustles of leaves the creek was heard babbling on its southern route.

In a modest glow, Wyatt leaned into the chair, popping wild nuts roasted and salted by his own hand. The slyness of trickery crowned him, and DG assumed he was not willing to answer.

"What?" Glitch held his chin up in a hand, the other with fingers delicately wrapped around a heavy mug, but the suggestion of humour rested in his eyes. "Did you steal it from someone? Pocket the deed after pilfering a Longcoat?"

"Tell them story," Raw said to Wyatt, himself sitting on the porch railing, part of them but always at a touchable distance. "Tell them story of house."

Wyatt's story had an introduction of a blue-wing's cheery song, and a huff from Chimtu as she settled jowls to feet for a nap. She had heard this tale before, and its melancholy, mawkish tones wearied a disposition already inclined to favour the sentimental.

"During the early time of the Resistance, when I was still an officer with the still active Tin Men, I became close friends with another officer and his wife. His name was Alec, her name was Schuyler, and they were known as the Littles.

"This property was once part of the farm Schuyler's family used to own. I say used to, but when her folks died, during the war, the deed was tied up in legalities until recently. But her father had given her this land when she and Alec married. Of course, when you're a Tin Man, you don't really consider living this far from Central City, not even for an outpost town like Ashers Falls that's quiet and real peaceful. Alec and Schuyler thought they'd build a cabin, something to use in the summer for long weekends, so she could keep an eye on her aging parents and Alec could forget about work for a while. They came out, spent a few weeks living with her parents, so they could form plans for the cabin. Schuyler's brother and sister, good architects in their own right, helped lay the place out. This area was cleared of a few trees and layers of undergrowth. That was a lot more work than they thought it'd be, and took nearly the whole summer. By that time, the war was rising, getting real bitter as the days went on, and Alec found himself a full-time member of the Resistance by the time the Tin Men were shut down for good.

"After that happened, Alec and Schuyler returned to Ashers Falls, but with the war going on, no money coming in, and her parents in failing health, they gave up trying to build the house and left the foundation to sit. And it did sit, for years and years. When her parents died, Schuyler and Alec were forced from the parents' home, and they went to live with Schuyler's brother. But every once in a while, the Littles would get nostalgic for their dream, and come back here, the clearing of the house they still wanted to build someday.

"One spring evening, Schuyler was walking home from the local laundry, where she worked hard for a small wage, and she took a detour to pass by this old empty field. On the road before the house, she passed an old man in ragged clothing, flossy white hair and keen eyes, who asked for her scarf in exchange for the apple he held out. Schuyler felt sorry for the man, and so she agreed to barter.

"'That apple ain't good for eating,' the drifter told her. 'I found it in the woods of some flying folk, and they run me out of there, accusing me of spying on them and taking their riches. But I had that apple in me pocket and didn't even know it. Been afraid to eat it ever since. It's from the flying folk, though, and it's still got some magic in it that ain't been rubbed out of it yet.'

"Of course, Schuyler thought this was a tall tale. It never crossed her mind to take back her scarf and return the apple—it was only an apple, and the drifter needed the scarf more than she did. Schuyler thanked him, and both of them went on their way. She turned around when she heard him whistling just to see his shape fade into the mist of the woods. Well, that gave her a bit of an eerie sensation, and suddenly the trees around her seemed alive with eyes. By the time she made it to the clearing in the woods, the place where Alec and she had buried their dreams knee-deep in weeds and wildflowers, Schuyler had second thoughts about eating the apple.

"In the middle of the meadow grew a single vale violet. They're rare around here, and seeing one is said to be good luck. Schuyler only saw one. It was taller than it should've been and rose above every other flower and grass. Schuyler thought it was beautiful, and bent in for a closer look. When she did, she fainted from hunger, and Alec found her hours later with a lantern in the light of the moons. She thought she might've dreamed the old drifter and his apple, and only lost her scarf along the road home the evening before, or that it had slipped from her as she fell. With Alec, Schuyler returned to the meadow. To their surprise, instead of a single vale violet growing in the field, they found a whole orchard. Now the orchard was not just of apple trees, but there were plenty of those, of any kind of apple you can imagine; but there were pear trees, mulberry trees, cherry trees, peach trees, plum trees, pecan trees, olive trees, apricot trees. All them that would be flowering that time of year were doing so: they were not saplings at all but full-grown trees.

"The Littles kept the orchard a secret, and for the whole growing season they tended it. When it was harvest time, they carried bushels of fruit in a horse and cart from the orchard to her brother's house. He asked where all the fruit had come from, and when he was told he didn't believe them, but a few slices of apple pie cleared his mind. He said they should enter their fruit into the Apple Harvest Faire. The Little did this, won every prize they could win, and sold every jar of preserves they'd made but for those they set aside for their own table. And after the Faire ended, they had enough money to start building the house they'd wanted to build for years and years. While the house was being built, Schuyler carried a child, but she died when the baby was born. Alec vowed he would not stay in Ashers Falls, with so many memories of his wife. And so he and the child went away into the north, leaving the house unfinished, leaving the orchard without anyone to harvest what it gives.

"I found out Alec's fate not long after the Eclipse ended, but before I went out east to do ranching for a while. Not too surprisingly, he died in the war, joined the Longcoats before all was said and done. But he left me the house, gods know why, and I thought I'd have a better chance of taking care of it than anyone. I'm not so fixed on dreams as I might've been once."

Moved by the tale, DG set a hand over Wyatt's and squeezed. Her fingers were pressed. "I think you're taking excellent care of the place. It's beautiful. But what happened to Alec and Schuyler's child?"

The response brought a touch of whimsy into his expression, then the capriciousness was smote with sorrow. "Alec wrote me a note, left with the lawyers, and said that she disappeared one day. Just—disappeared. Alec said he thought it was the flying folk coming back and taking her to raise as their own, a payment for the orchard they had grown… But I don't know if I believe that story. I wouldn't believe any of it. Except that I was here and saw the empty field where the orchard is now, where six months later I saw mature trees ready with fruit. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it at all.

"So I've taken over their house, and I've finished construction, following Alec's blueprints. He said in his letter it was a bit like changing horses midstream, and I suppose it is. He didn't think the orchard would mind so much, as long as someone would be here when the Apple Harvest Faire comes around."

Glitch was leaning against the table, hands to elbows, placid and entranced. He watched DG and Wyatt separate hands with a passing glance, nothing more, and thought the affection between them as bold as dances with laughter and wine. "You want us to help you with this Apple Harvest Faire?"

"It's getting late," Wyatt said in place of a full reply, "and you two have had a long day. I'll tell you the rest tomorrow."

It was Glitch who busted the seams of inappropriateness by an irreverent titter. Real laughter, out of humour and love, would be a long time coming. "The mind boggles that there should be yet more to this story!"

"That was just the story of the house." Wyatt gave a calm reply to Glitch's outburst.

"Hey! You said earlier that you'd tell us tomorrow!" accused DG straight to Wyatt.

Wyatt smirked into her combination sneer and pout. How strange that he'd missed a look he'd never really noticed before, yet it sent a dark wave brushing the bottom of his heart. He said he'd draw her a bath worthy of a princess, and stooped inside the homestead.

A look around told them Raw had escaped during story's interlude, and without him to question, DG and Glitch sighed at each other.

"Enchanted orchards," DG intoned woodenly.

"Yeah, tell me about it." He reached over and patted her hand, fancying it was still warm from the pressure of Wyatt's fingers. "Oh what will they think of next!"


	4. Easy as Pie

4.

**Easy As Pie**

-x-

The dawn had not yet come as the lids of DG's eyes reluctantly lifted. At first it was startling, this strange place. The quiet impeded with long notes of frogs and vain southern crickets who would stay and stay until frost nipped at their legs. She writhed in brief panic, wandering this demarcated foreign gap, and returned by the discovered weight of warmth at her side. Nothing comforted as well as Glitch, not since the first moment he twirled her senses, kissed her hair, brought the love out in her eyes, and promised to live a life with her if it meant a lie would follow another lie.

The light was faint, inexact, the omniscient glare of a trillion stars visible in the countryside wide above the roof. Glitch shone as pale grey against black, but she saw the hollows of his eyes flicker. She'd disturbed him from sleep, the accomplishment done while smiling. Her arm was loosened from beneath and wrapped at his neck, sent into a tingle by a touch of his fingertips down the smoothness of curves to the width of her hips. Sometimes at night he sprawled from one corner of her bed to the next, practically leaving her to sleep on the floor, or up high on the pillows, out of the way. And other nights he slept scarcely, plagued by nightmares, or, worse still, the fear of a nightmare lurking, encroaching, ready to claim him as prey. Rarely did the two of them sleep well, arm and arm, body to body, breath to breath. This moment was not one of meagre passing tenderness.

"What's wrong with him, Glitch?"

The slip of seriousness in her voice prompted the same reaction inside. His mouth twitched a little, sadly—the crook of his lip was full of rue and wonder and woe—but he said it calmly: "You know, DG, I'm just not sure."

"See if you can find out."

"Well, I'm sure that will be a successful venture. You know how Wyatt and I have bonded through the years."

"I'm serious."

"I know you are. I'm worried about him, too. And this place," he shook his head and brought their hands and heads together, "what's he doing in this place? Enchanted orchards, a tale of tragic romance, a gift of a house, what does it mean to him?"

"It must mean something or he wouldn't be here. How about if we agree to keep our hands to ourselves," of course he would scan her abruptly for a sign of a joke, and found none, "until we know for sure it's not us that's bringing him down. I didn't mean for him to find out like this."

"I didn't think he had it in him. Where'd he get all that intuition? I guess Tin Man instincts don't fade like seasons. But, fine." Glitch kissed her as though for the last time, a hum and a nibble and a linger. Then he rolled to his side, the silent movement of an unspoken goodbye. "No touching until we find out what's wrong with him. We'll ambush him. You—and then me—and then maybe you again. He'll open up to you."

"I don't know about that."

"He will," Glitch found he could be adamant about this. "You have feelings, they shine in you, clear and unobstructed. I don't know what I can do with him except talk him to death. How would that be helpful? It's the other way around that he needs: a listener, not a talker. Once you get a summary, report to me, would you? I want to do what I can." Sighing, he flipped to his back and held conference with the shadows on the ceiling, and then with her, beautiful and forgiving and strong. "He seems pellucid, like smoke—something vague, ready to capture a brewing storm, or, I don't know—a rainbow in the light of the moons. Why do I feel like he doesn't really want us here, but that if we walk out on him, we'll never see him again?"

DG sniffled and wrapped herself beside him. She needed the familiar feel of his torso beneath her hands, the value of his arm against her, the lightness of his fingers at the base of her neck, between flyaway sheaves of obsidian hair.

"You'll talk to him?"

He knew the tone. She wanted a promise. Promising to talk with Wyatt was the second easiest thing he had ever given her. "Tomorrow, if there's time. You will, too, won't you?"

"I will. Whenever there's a possibility, I'll take it."

They fell back to sleep, clumped together, and woke late. They idled beneath the sheets for a moment, ridding themselves of slumber's headiness. A delicious smell wafted through the home, and when Glitch spoke it was with wisdom.

"It's apples," he said of the scent. "It's apples cooking on a wood-burning stove. For the rest of our stay here, sugar and apples and pies will wake us every morning and bring us to sleep every night."

He was nearly right.

-x-

A pretty stranger, in the shape of a voluptuous woman, all fine round lumps lodged in a striped housedress bottomed off with sturdy boots, greeted the late-risers. She smiled and nodded her curly chestnut head, but elbows deep in a sticky flour mixture prevented her from taking hands at introduction. DG already had a feeling…

"You're Meria Maddigan."

The woman's smile broadened, and brown eyes twinkled merriment and friendship. DG liked her straightaway. Glitch had his misgivings: he could not forget so easily that she was a witch, and that "good" as an adjective could very well be wrongly placed. He had known one too many witches in his days, those that had seen him as an advisor and those that had seen him as a wanderer, and he traipsed the better side of caution.

While Meria baked, she hummed, and she danced around the kitchen like a snowflake on a sunny day. Wyatt came in from the gardens, heaving wood for the oven fire. No gas or electricity yet reached this house, and Wyatt announced it was partly the plan of the Littles that he had clung to as he finished the place, but mostly that he saw no reason to modernise just yet. DG found that living without amenities otherwise used to had no unfavourable repercussions, as long as the proper utilities were available. The oven was marvellous, and Meria's pies emerged in a splendid show of perfection. She set them on a wooden block to cool, and over them Wyatt hovered. He elbowed Meria, she elbowed him, then turned away, humming again that same cheerful tune. Later in the afternoon, she would be friendly enough to teach it to them, so that the house was full of song enough to drown out the birds of the wood. And they quieted, tucking beak to wing for a nap, as if they could not keep up.

Wyatt took DG and Glitch down a narrow path from the garden and into the outlying forest. It widened to an expanse of ferns and boulders, green with moss and downy brome. It was alive with tiny yellow marsh marigolds so hypnotising in beauty that Glitch nearly didn't notice the conspicuous structure folded in the underbrush and saplings. Aside from being a brilliant piece of masonry, for it was all rounded river stones that formed a sort of niche at the base of the rocky creek cliffs, Glitch had no idea what it was. Naturally, the adventurous DG divined the entrance and slipped from sight.

"Hey, Wyatt, how'd you do this?"

Glitch lobbed Wyatt a curious look, then dashed in to join DG. He found himself in a square wide enough to stretch his arms out, tip to tip, without touching the stone. And this he did, DG aping the movement, and Wyatt coming upon them. And it was almost there, that hint of real laughter—though it dwindled, too immature to show itself.

"Figure out what it is yet?" he asked the two of them.

DG dropped her arms, smirking at him. She, of the mechanical mind, had understood. "It's a shower."

"A—what?" Glitch veered around, pointing as he went, to a handle there and a pipe there, "and oh a soap dish!" He sniffed the soap and approved. "Apple blossom! I should've guessed! Do you really shower out here?"

"Sometimes," Wyatt said.

"In winter?" countered Glitch. He took the soap back from DG, who'd wanted to smell it, too, and Glitch smelled it again. There was a trace of Wyatt in it somewhere, or a hint of the soap on the lasting bouquet of Wyatt Cain.

"Not usually in winter, though you are far south enough that it's not always below freezing." He nodded placidly at them, ready to end this portion of their adventure. "Well, feel free to use it whenever you want. Just don't forget to bring a towel. It's a long walk back to the house."

DG put a hand on her hip. "Speaking from experience?"

And then he smiled, a genuine, undiluted thing. It was too small for the great billow of laughter to break pinions—too small yet.

-x-

He walked them through the trees and spoke of things other than the fruits and the pests and the shape of the leaves. He asked for their thoughts on Meria.

"She's fun," DG opined, "I like her. Not what I expected from a witch who gave you a wolf, Wyatt."

"That's the funny thing about people, DG." He paused and tossed a rotten plum to the orchard border. "When it comes to new people, you can't rush a judgement. Have to let them grow on you a little bit before you can make a decision either way."

She was nearly at her threshold with this remark. The things he kept insinuating, the things he kept saying… But Glitch shook his head, a warning that Wyatt did not see, and DG felt the ember of temper flare and fall.

Now was not the time to analyse Wyatt's philosophies.

They went back to the house, and found that Raw had arrived. He was in fair spirits, but to Glitch and DG he explained that he was not always around, that sometimes the forest hailed him, or a mountaintop must be witnessed—or a little girl in a nearby village had been injured, and he would be asked to come for his curative powers and counsel. How he should be asked, by whom or by what notification, neither Glitch nor DG could articulate: it was too private and far from the capabilities of their minds. But Raw vowed to stay the evening. He sensed the tension among them, the reluctance of emotions a superior runnel through Wyatt. They would not need him, his opinions, his healing, his expertise, but he would stay. He cared for them, and he would stay for that reason alone.

Chimtu had followed them all over, one end of the garden to the other, and she went at once to her giant old quilt, folded into quarters on one side of the wood stove in the sitting room, and there she curled up and slept the day, while action and education went on in the kitchen.

Meria was going to teach them the fine art of canning.

"It's as easy as pie, darlings, as easy as pie. The first thing you need, after the fruit, is a jar."

She waved her arm and went off, the four of them following. A weather-beaten hutch in the sitting room had once been blue with yellow accents, though time had all but worn away the paint. The glass window panes in the double doors rattled as Meria drew them apart.

It was full of jars. Every shelf was packed with every available size of glass jar.

The others stared as though they had expected the usual hutch items: fine bone china plates, elaborate crystal salt and pepper shakers, a butter dish from long ago, a silver platter used at the wedding of ancestors. These jars violated their expectations.

But Wyatt nodded.

"Easy as pie."

He was nearly right.


	5. Straws on the Wind

5.

**Straws On The Wind**

-x-

The dying notes of an ancient song, wordless and nameless, pattered on fading steps through DG's mind. Drowsy still, the tune faded as she rolled into Glitch's weight. His head beneath the pillow and the gentle rise and fall of his back beneath the linens was often an unfamiliar sight to her in the morning. He slept little, plagued by anxiety or the very threat of it, and his restless mind ripped him from slumber far too often. He was always out of bed before her. But that was habit, a tradition to keep their secret their own. Or had it started on that first adventure, and she hadn't noticed?

"Please don't say good morning," came his muffled voice. A set of lips at his shoulder, a nose across his skin, and he moved to see her. But out shot a hand to protect him from window's glare. "It's going to be one of those days."

DG sighed, nodded, and patted his chest.

-x-

The mist and dew were heavy in the thick blades of orchard grass. Ghostly fingers wrapped around the edge of the woods, and beams of the rising suns spread gold and red fires against splotches of clouds low on the horizon. Wyatt took a look at the east, an empty basket in his hands.

"It's going to rain later. A storm, probably. Here." He handed DG the basket, taking another for himself, and the two of them, toes damp from moisture, and by their side Chimtu, they wended to the orchard.

"How do you… know that?" DG glared at the same sky he had. She thought it was the same sky. But he saw qualities therein she had missed. "You see different sunrises, Wyatt, and you see different sunsets."

At orchard's threshold, Wyatt paused, not because of what she had uttered, but for the words she hadn't said. They'd spent so little time together in the last two years… So little, and yet she never called him Mr Cain. How had he become Wyatt so quickly? But he stepped away from the enquiry. He couldn't ask her that now. It had become superfluous somehow. He missed it, her little voice, Mr. Cain…

"Glitch's headaches affected by the weather at all?"

"Not noticeably, no. It happens to headcases. And he does have allergy issues. Being out in the woods, all this mould…" She gestured to the trees, stable and imperial in the calm morning air. It was a beautiful morning, the sort she enjoyed, with a chill, and the hot breath from her mouth was a vague and visible cloud. And Wyatt's, too, but more pronounced, as though he was warmer inside. "Poor Glitch, he'll miss our fun."

"He'd think this is fun?"

"He'd think it's fun to watch us." DG analysed the first tree they came to. Apples, gorgeous and perfect. She could believe they were rooted in magic. "How do you know when they're ripe?"

"They come off with a touch. Like this." He reached across her for one pome. At the slightest urging its stem released. Wyatt turned the apple loose for DG. "Did you grow apples in Kansas?"

"We were farmers of a different sort." The apple turned under her inspection. Suddenly, her gaze snapped to Wyatt's, sensing a specific wished for. "Cattle, mostly. Some grains. But we never did much in the way of canning. This is a new experience for me."

"The first time for me, too, DG, don't forget." He propped the tree ladder in the notch of the trunk's main arteries. Instead of climbing it himself, he explained to DG how it was done. "Harvesting is supposed to be your job, after all."

"And what are you supposed to do? If Meria's not here to help, and with Raw gone… What's your job, Wyatt?"

"Someone has to cut all those apples," Wyatt said it in passing, his mind already on the next thought. "It's too bad Raw's not here today. He might've been able to help Glitch."

DG lifted her shoulders, tucking another ripe fruit in the basket corner. "Glitch could use a day in bed."

"Even if he's in pain?"

"Some things happen for a reason."

"You think he runs himself down too much there at the palace?"

"I think we all take on more responsibility than we can handle."

"If you mean the orchard, we can handle it."

Her head shook, and she had to look from him into the boughs. His eyes held a strange, sorrowful depth, a thawing from the inside to the outside. "I want to be here. So does Glitch." She paused, the vibration of the question arriving without preparation. "Do you want to be here?"

At her position on the ladder, it was an effortless move for Wyatt to set his hand to the top of her hip, to coax her down. Bewildered but obeisant, DG watched him take the basket from her, set it among the others, mostly empty yet, and return to take her arm.

"I want to show you something."

"Isn't it a little early for a break? We just got started."

"A lot of breaks will be had. Half the fun of harvest is making sure your break-to-work ratio is greatly one-sided. Besides, you need this."

Birds in the woods shot their voices clear to the empyrean. DG commented that one was trying to drown out the other, that they were all trying to be heard over each other. Chimtu dashed into the underbrush and scared away rabbits and ermines, successful at both, forgiving no creature that crossed her path unknown. When her hunting instincts were at rest, she was their indefatigable guide. Over rocks and under a stone bridge, along Ashers Creek falling infinitely to the south-west, Chimtu knew the way. She had walked it before, and she never paused until the end. The jagged rocks increased. The hiss of rushing water filled the vale. A step beyond and into the clear, DG's feet stopped abruptly. The monolith of stone had many tiers, and parted the water over itself unequally, but the result was a wonderful cascade. Myriad ferns and moss and marsh flowers spotted the waterfall in colours that did not exist elsewhere.

And—

DG squinted in a tilt to the left. "Are those pumpkins?"

Wyatt said they were. "Wild pumpkins that some pioneer must've planted here ages and ages ago, and they keep showing up year after year." Her hand went to his as he ushered her down the slope and to the creek's edge. An old bridge of crumbling stone and mortar, healed here and there by wooden slats, would take them to the other shore. In a moment, though, after Wyatt explained. "These are not the proper falls, those are up on the north side of town. These are the Baby Falls, as locals here call them."

"They're beautiful. Finaqua has a lot of water, lakes and lakes of water, but not much in the way of waterfalls. I have to go into the mountains to see one."

"Glitch go with you?"

"He somehow got it into his brain that he's a good hiker."

A smile peeked out of Wyatt's sombre mouth. "Don't know where he would've picked up a fancy notion like that. Want to see the pumpkins?"

They were already ripening. Some were too green still, and some were rotten on one side. DG saw how they were able to grow. A break in the canopy shone afternoon light in a tiny spot of the woods, and the pumpkins thrived in the warm touch of the suns. DG leaned back from her appraisal.

"I suppose we harvest these, too?"

"I suppose so. Gotta admit that I'm not a big pumpkin fan."

"Me either. Still, you have to think someone at the Faire will be happy to have it." Her hands went up and immediately back down, slapping against her thighs. "Well! All right! I know there are two in here we can take back with us…" While she shuffled through the hairy pumpkin leaves, fat and round-bottomed and pointy-tipped, she was keenly aware of Wyatt watching her. He spoke, and it was a relief, like a cold rain on a hot day.

"Can I ask you something?"

She wished he would. Anything at all. She couldn't forget the promise made, the one promise to keep on this holiday. _What was bothering Wyatt?_ DG's imagination had so far circled the globe of ridiculous fears, that he was sick, that he never wanted to see them again, that he wished they'd never found him that day… "Yeah, of course."

"I was just wondering…"

DG wrestled around to face him, sensing the need to do so locked in his tone. "Yeah?"

"Are you happy?"

Did he mean in general? Did he mean with Glitch? She waded from the patch, carrying one small pumpkin in her hands. A log waited, and she set the gourd in her lap. Beside her, a spot was patted for Wyatt.

"I shouldn't have asked you that," said Wyatt. "It's none of my business."

"It is your business. I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for you. If anyone has a right to know if I'm happy with the life I've been living, you do. And yes—for the most part, I'm happy. I miss some things about the Other Side. Did you think I wouldn't? But I prefer it here." Her gander rested on the falls, the landscape, the two suns in the sky. "It's peaceful. For some of us it's real peaceful. Wyatt—" She found her mouth pressed under rough fingers. In the gaze against hers, DG found thoughts unchanged, and the fiery wheel of passion: scorn and concern, fear and love. He did not let his hand drift away immediately, but let it stay, touching the outline of her lips, the convex bump of her chin, the soft line of her jaw. Out of fright she rose, forgetting the pumpkin and seeing it drop to the ground.

"It was a bad idea to come here, Wyatt, I'm sorry."

The crunch of leaves ended a few moments later. Wyatt angled, his hope subtle, as DG retraced her steps. He saw her intention, the pumpkin, and bent to retrieve it just when she did. He had it, and her fingers had to touch his as he handed her the prize.

"That's not," DG stalled, "the most mature way to handle this situation. I won't run off and leave you. If there's something you want to tell me, just tell me. Don't—don't hide it. Don't pour it out in innuendo and not expect me to notice. And, anyway," her nerves were soothed behind one thread of truth, "I know you didn't want me here just for me—_me_—because you invited Glitch, too. Whenever you're ready to tell us what's on your mind, we'll be ready to listen."

He thanked her. No words, only a nod. In the mysterious patch, another ready pumpkin was discovered. They took their findings back to the house and set them on the porch. Morning was nearly over, and their toiling had not really begun. Wyatt said he'd prepare some apples for baking butters and sauce. DG said she'd return to the orchard. Before she went, she hugged him, the strength of her arms returned by him, with a lasting caress across the waves of her hair.

She wended the path towards the trees. The mist had fled. The suns continued to rise and bathe the trees in autumn light. In temptation, she turned. Wyatt opened the screen door, Chimtu in first, and caught DG looking back. A moment passed. The door closed. Something had begun.

She arrived in the orchard. The trees seemed different, hushed and mournful and old. Knowledgeable, as if they waited, too, as the princess did, to see how this would end.

A leaf fell into her hand. She shredded it, let it go, and watched it alight briefly and fall, like straws in the wind.


	6. Cart's Before the Horse

6.

**The Cart's Before The Horse**

-x-

"I'll stay," were DG's first words the next day. A sore Glitch, rubbing his forehead and squinting into the glare of downy clouds, had risen from bed, donned a couple extra layers against the heaviness in the southern air, and stood over the bed. Somewhere beyond his shoulder, DG imagined, Wyatt had hovered. But DG had patted his cheek, her wrist kissed in return, and had sent him away with Wyatt to Meria Maddigan's. If Meria did not, or could not, provide an herbal remedy for Glitch's perpetual headache, reaching into its second day, then Raw's homestead, which Wyatt affectionately called a "yurt", was not too far. The viewer could help if the good witch failed.

DG stayed, though lolled in bed not longer than five minutes after hearing the screen door shut. She wanted to get them caught up. The night before, Wyatt had said they were falling behind. The Faire crept closer. If unprepared, they could not meet the entry requirements. The look on Wyatt's face… doubt and hope and yearning… he smiled all of it away, down a drain, but DG had noticed. The Faire's importance to Wyatt spanned conception.

Dressed in a long riding skirt layered beneath with warm petticoats, a bit of a change from trousers, and a heavy cable-knit sweater, DG arrived in the kitchen to find that Wyatt had left her oatmeal, warm cider… and, for company, Chimtu.

-x-

The distance from Wyatt's house at the tail end of Ashers Creek to the place of the good witch was "less than four spans, though a bit more than three and three-quarters", so Wyatt had declared. It would take them two hours. Glitch timed them, for a bit of recreation in the ordeal, by the hands of his pocket watch, a gift from DG on his last birthday. He only mentioned this because Wyatt had asked. And it never occurred to Glitch, until that very moment, speaking of birthdays and presents from others, that so little knowledge about Wyatt had been tapped. He was full of fiction and full of truth, for all Glitch realised.

Endeavouring to be of fair company in this office of traveller, though the throbbing above his left eye was a tiny massacre, Glitch kept his footsteps as graceful as his voice. "When is your birthday, Wyatt? We've never asked… _I_ have never asked. And we should've…" The grace danced with regret, and Glitch allowed it. Wyatt Cain had slipped from them somehow—an eclipse they hadn't known was coming, but had watched it fall.

They stopped to survey the stratagems of passing a flume cut by rain's sudden torrent. Shoulder to shoulder, one in red and one in brown, they watched the streams of water through leaves of gold and chartreuse. Glitch felt Wyatt's gaze on him, the scrutiny permitted, eventually met… Glitch saw an unexpected blankness in Wyatt that abruptly filled as he hopped across the water.

"My birthday was two days ago."

Glitch calculated this as he did the gulch. "The day we got here…" Instead of one bound, Glitch, two steps back, ran into a leap. His heel sunk in muck. Wyatt's hand grabbed his and tugged forward. Glitch held them together, palm to palm, searching and experiencing excuses. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"It wasn't important. I wasn't expecting a trinket. Just the two of you. That was enough."

Wyatt shook the hand in his, pivoting towards the slow ascent of a hill crowded in goldenrod and chokeberries. But Glitch held on and held Wyatt back. In him was the same incurable desire to understand why Wyatt Cain had brought them to such a beguiling little house among old, southern trees. A greater purpose loomed. Wyatt wanted them for more than apples and a splendid autumn faire. Glitch smoothed down the sparse, fair hairs on the back of the hand in his, real and warm and as old as his own. So different than DG's: smoothed by youth, freckled, manicured, perfumed…

"So," Glitch savoured the relief that Wyatt did not pull away immediately, yet they stood close, enough for the eye to perceive textures and aromas in the depth of shadow and light, "why did you bring us here?"

"Well, the faire…"

Glitch smiled gently. "If that's the pretty white lie you want to keep feeding us, Wyatt, that's fine. We'll just… go on believing it."

"Then that's what we'll all do." Wyatt brushed him off, and learned, in one second, not to do it again. Glitch grabbed the front of his vest and shirt into a fist and hurled him around. And now it seemed that their nearness before was cosmic compared to the closeness of now. The vague awareness of it passed in a dark glaze, and hooded Wyatt, and enlightened Glitch. He stopped and held his ear to Wyatt's chest.

"Glitch? What—?"

"Shh, shh, _shh_!" Glitch flailed a hand with each word. "I'm trying to listen…" But before the beat of a heart drummed sullenly against his lobe, Glitch was hulled, wrenched away. The wince was from the pain in his head, it hammered from back to front, lasting longest in the vertical sting across his scalp. And Wyatt seemed to hold him up more than hold him away. Questions bloomed and buzzed like the scurrying insects around them. Glitch searched for one, found it, and handed it to Wyatt.

"It's the leaves—the drying leaves. And I think it might be you."

Blinking, Wyatt realised he'd been holding Glitch this whole time, the red sleeves crumpled beneath his fingers, yet didn't dare let go. "You just have some allergies…"

"But I get worried, and worry leads to stress, and the stress leads to… Headaches, and please, please, _please_, Wyatt, tell me you're okay. Tell me it's just the apples and the faire and that you missed us. Tell me it's loneliness and not anguish." Glitch glanced down at the imaginary hole in Wyatt, then rose his gaze to Wyatt's mouth, to his eyes, eyes watching his mouth, and swallowed nerves and pain and air. "Tell me you still have a heart, and you didn't really lose it in iron all those years ago…"

The breath he drew in happened suddenly and against his will, as Wyatt's hand shifted from shoulder to waist. The touch of fingers beneath the coat, the intense glare, the hopeful bump of foreheads and noses… Glitch would let it happen, _let it_, for the thrill of the moment, for Wyatt's soft air against his, for the heat of lips and the brush across the cheek of soft fingertips. In a moment, it passed, there and gone and in hiding again, the real Wyatt that Glitch had just witnessed. Funny not to pass a smile, funny not to want to grin. He'd just kissed someone, Wyatt Cain, and never had a kiss been so strange.

"I didn't smile after kissing DG, either." He said it aloud. How had he? But Wyatt was all repose, unflustered, serenity standing in the woods, composure ten times the strength of tin.

"Were you supposed to?" Wyatt wondered why Glitch had said it, and then wondered why he had to know. What was a smile supposed to mean? Happiness, reverence? It was only a kiss. Only a kiss he could do a hundred times again. "We were supposed to?"

"No," Glitch responded, shameless but forceful, tactful but unambiguous. "I'll have to tell her what we did—what I—what we just did."

Wyatt grunted and moved on, up the hill and to a valley swept in green and mottled in the newness of autumn leaves.

"You don't mind? You don't care that I have to tell her? Duty compels me, you know!"

Diverted by Wyatt's indifference, Glitch failed to heed the masterful view. Then Wyatt kept him still, and with the lift of his chin indicated the lay of the valley. Marshes were dappled in the frothy greyness of ghostly fog. Forests bordered the marshland, full of trees grown when time was in its infancy, before the land claimed by wars and monarchies. Above it all was the glorious sky, one of the moons faded and almost forgotten by day, a sickle on its side. In the kaleidoscope of beauty, Glitch's senses, excitement its whetstone, discerned their destination.

Like all witches, she lived in a tower. Meria Maddigan's tower was old, old as the woods, and of crumbling stone. Half of it was missing, the lea of the south-eastern corner. And half of it was bleached by the mighty drapes of the suns, so that it was fair and gaunt and bold against the emerald land. Smoke rose from a crooked chimney, from a patched red shingle roof, and curled a signal of welcome in its whirl of grey.

Wyatt led Glitch through the broken picket gate, into a menagerie of all animal kingdoms. Goats and geese covered the alphabetical assortment of "G", and bleated and hissed, not identically, at the newcomers. Kittens woke in the grass, and sleepily drew themselves to sate a curiosity that never slept. Toads leapt across porch floorboards at the resonance of footsteps. Hens clucked and roosters scratched. By the door, Glitch jumped back, straight to Wyatt's waiting arm, at the blue-ringed vulture, sharp of beak and bald of head, perched on deadwood, a black patch over a lost eye. It grunted at them, like a moribund door chime, and the blue feathers at the neck ruffled, going in only to expand. For Wyatt did not have to knock to announce their presence. But he turned to Glitch.

"I expect you to tell her." It went back to what Glitch had said, but he went back to watching the door, crooked on its frame, rusty hinges in disrepair. "I invited both of you here."

"But you…" Glitch almost didn't know what he should say. "You kissed me."

"I didn't see you stopping it."

"I didn't…" Didn't what? Want to? Know how to say no to Wyatt Cain? Didn't know that it was in him—in either of them—lurking like some rapacious, licentious incorporeal wind? It wasn't that he didn't know. He knew. He'd learned. He spoke blankly, blatant in dropping the mask of surprise. "I didn't want to. I didn't _want_ to… What am I supposed to tell DG?"

"Visitors… On a wonderful day like today!"

Glitch and Wyatt whipped around at the voice of Meria. Wrapped at her right arm was a harmless snake. She dropped her hand: it slithered into the high grasses beyond the path. In her gaze was a wisdom thick, potent, trenchant. She set her hands to her wide, round hips, her wide, round eyes to Cain.

"Once again you've done it."

He smirked and knew what she meant.

"The cart's before the horse, isn't it?"

Glitch glanced between them. They had their own language. And, for a moment, whatever words they were speaking had nudged Wyatt into the region of boyish shame. It twisted the smirk and coyly tucked his head.

"I can't seem to help it."

"Oh," Glitch uttered, mocking himself, his own dull-witted mind filled to the brim with surprise, "the wonders of revelation." He dropped it all. It was still in his arms—Wyatt, DG, some words, some breath, a kiss—but occult prestidigitation of mind, and all vanished temporarily. He looked at the vulture. Why did she seem to cackle at him? He looked at Meria, the good witch, and rubbed the hairline, the vertical stripe, the roughness of teeth and pepper-grey curls.

She spoke first. Better her, Glitch thought, than the vulture at his shoulder. "Got a headache, Glitch?"

"Wyatt said you could fix me."

"Not all the way, but I can get you going." Meria tiptoed through them, a string of kittens in the echoing section of her steps. A glance passed to Glitch, and to Wyatt she passed a second. "You'll have to do the rest."


	7. A Lick and a Promise

7.

**A Lick And A Promise**

-x-

The dark grey of an autumn storm sweeping across the suns had already arrived. It came in, slowly and drearily. Until spring, perhaps, the last of its kind. DG listened to the rain, carefully trod upon the roof, with a louder tack against the chimney, or the sounds at the corners as it gushed to the ground. The potbellied parlour stove imbued the luxury of cosiness never known in the galactic palace rooms. She'd browsed the books before the trim of daylight and the first cool drop rippled the rain barrel. On the shelf were cookbooks, guide books of the southern realms, and, shoved between covers worn was one thin hardcover without a title. A journal, told by handwritten pages. A journal of the household goods, inventory, expenditures, of the Littles, Alec and Schuyler. DG had nearly believed they were an invention, a fable needed to make the old orchard seem less intangible. To find that they had lived—lived and cared about their home that never was—one word was smeared where she'd left a tear.

In the lay that transformed thoughts to lazy daises, DG tried to focus on Wyatt. His behaviour, was it mysterious or was there a method? Had she seen the shrouds of loneliness in his eyes? Was it the caustic grip of a grief that would not leave? His sorrow had been ever-present. She knew sorrow could change, the skin of a chameleon overcoming the wisdom of man. Had it altered to the warmth of fingers across her lips? Or a hope that loyalty remained… Through his friends, the condensation of his misery might be sieved.

Cerebral strength waned considerably as Chimtu, from her mound of quilt by the stove, roved from it. Her purpose was the door. A moment later, behind a grumble from the angry sky, the travellers returned. Wyatt crossed the threshold, so full of rain, a cloudburst himself, that Chimtu shook to rid herself of his residue. DG forgot all she had philosophised and rushed to aid. She swept off his hat and readied a hand for his coat. Out the screen, the damp, scented wind raised hair along chilled arms beneath a sweater.

"Where is Glitch?"

"He's coming."

Wyatt found his coat taken from him. She hadn't allowed him to protest. They were hauled to the potbellied stove, to dry and rest. The screen door popped and snapped. DG went frigid at the sight of Glitch. He was costumed in uncertainty, the way he would sometimes get. She caught the scent of a lie on the back of the storm.

The theory transcended from thought to reality as Wyatt excused himself. "Bed," he declared, and moved wearied limbs away. Passing through the kitchen, he stopped. He sniffed. He looked at DG.

"I… tried to cook something," she murmured, ashamed of her lacking skills.

Glitch emitted an astonished, nonsensical grunt. His hand upon her neck was ponderous sympathy. She stepped from it, to the shaft of the kitchen's lantern light.

"It's a mess." DG had yet to apologise. She'd left the ruined cobbler on display, and a burned, unidentifiable artefact on a tray next to it. "I got frustrated, all at once, so I gave the kitchen a lick and a promise, and betook myself elsewhere. Away from stoves. And hot things. And food in general."

Wyatt merely nodded. "It's fine. I'll clean it up tomorrow, before Meria gets here. Really," he pressured sincerity into her shoulder, "it's fine. I just hope you ate something."

"Raw left some trail mix. He'll have to come back soon, too, since I… ate it all."

He altered his hand to touch her jaw, smiling, a gleam of pale mirth inside. "He'll be glad someone's eaten it. Think it's been sitting in the cupboard since I moved in. Well, goodnight." The turning away screamed awkwardness, misunderstanding. Three times, his leg was patted, and Chimtu came to him. He fixed an emotionless, uncompromising eye upon Glitch. "I'll see you in the morning."

"If I'm still alive."

Wyatt had gone and DG had worried.

"Are you…? Did Meria heal your headache?"

"The headache—the least of my concerns right now." The bob of his shaggy, damp head indicated the alcove beyond the parlour. He needed to shed the layers of wet. "And I'm not so comfortable doing that in the middle of the kitchen. On any other day, maybe. Wet is one thing. Cold is always another. Come with me. I need to talk. Whether you listen, that is up to you. I can't control the antipathy of your ears."

DG shut the bedroom door. Wyatt's room was in the loft, but above them was storage. Empty yet. There was nothing to store. The rain dimmed their voices and all the noise of Glitch's clothes, but they still whispered when they spoke. She lit a wick by the will of magic, only a child's game, a parlour trick. Glitch had removed the coat to the desk chair's bald back, and DG picked it up from there. He flinched at her hands and quivered at the fingertips across his abdomen.

"Sorry," she stepped away only to have her wrist grabbed and returned to the warm beneath his shirt. Their half-steps collided thighs and intentions. "I thought we said hands off until we know what's wrong with Wyatt?"

"You found out something." He pinched her lip gently in his teeth and pulled from her the precursory breath of ecstasy. "I found out something. With what you found out and with what I found out, I think we've found out. And visiting Meria… I had a thought. It's this place."

She leaned away, the roam of explicit thoughts lost in the sobering fray. "This place?"

"More than this place. It's him. Don't get me wrong, it's him. But it's—it's— Oh, DG, it's everything. It's morbid and fantastic and incongruent." He stomped in the emptiness beside the bed. A pillow was picked at, tossed, the victim of a frustrated man. "Didn't you say that you saw something in him yesterday? What was it, did you decide?"

"A wistful look," she said, crossing her arms and kneeling on the bed, "wistful and sad."

"Lonely and full of longing."

"Yeah." DG read the proclamation, a thousand words upon Glitch's face. If they knew Wyatt's burden, shouldn't they be glad? But they had been corticated, and left to writhe, unprotected. "He tried to kiss me."

"I let him kiss me."

DG tilted her head and tucked a hair behind her ear. She thought of the journal she'd found, the precious lines about nothing at all, only the jelly jars, the state of pressed linens. And how Wyatt must've cared, too, about this place. It was a dream for the lonely and the dead.

She went to Glitch and held him. The ethereal monody in the rain, the perfume of it in Glitch's skin, all painted the images of a vacant woods, two men embracing, her favourite Glitch, and her second favourite Wyatt Cain.

"You're not angry." Glitch's chest vibrated beneath her ear, voice and nerves and breath.

"No," she remembered to say so quickly. "No… I should've kissed him."

"Why?"

"It gave you answers. I'm still helplessly facing a thousand questions."

"It wouldn't help if I tried to tell you. Like kissing a veil, a mask, and only a spark of it was sane."

"There was a spark."

"I'm made of flint. I spark at the slightest touch of metal, steel, iron, or tin. You're steel. Wyatt is still made of iron. You should talk to him. He invited both of us here. And the cryptic thing is tiresome by now. The faire will start in two days. We're running out of time."

The faire had become the doomsday date.

"I'll talk to him."

"Don't kiss him. Let him speak the answers. Orally. And by that I mean with a voice and a tongue and lungs pushing out air."

"I promise. Would you do it again?"

"Kiss him?"

"Would you?"

"My lips belong to you. The heart and the half a brain, too."

"I'm not jealous. You haven't given me a reason to be."

"But I kissed him."

"He's Wyatt."

"And that means that you would kiss him, too."

"I'll talk to him."

"When?"

"Tomorrow." Each of DG's hands grabbed a corner of the sweater hem, and up it went, high over her head. Glitch helped. To him, this was one of the nicest parts of his day. "Not tonight. I'm tired and heartsick tonight. Strangely lonely, almost homesick. For what, I don't know. Just melancholy. Loving the rain and wishing I could stay in it. But I expect blue skies in the morning. We'll wake again to the scent of apples cooking."

Glitch kissed her sweetly, neck and eyelids and chin, and tucked her beneath the covers. He left the shutters open to catch the wind, to hear the last of the storm as over the remote hills it went. For hours, stopping and starting, they spoke the traditional all and sundry of daily things. She drifted to sleep, the flutter of discontent cupped inside her heart. And when Glitch slept, he woke at the start of another vagrant storm. He locked the shutters and hid beneath the pillow and DG's arm. And thereafter, as night ebbed and storms were spent, anger and horror razed the delicacy of his dreamscapes.


	8. No Stone Unturned

8.

**No Stone Unturned**

-x-

The eaves and the trees were still dripping. The house was still resting. Chimtu heard the weight of small feet and found DG slipping slowly into awareness. The failures of her attempts haunted. Waste and debris, one crumbled and tasteless, the other bitter as carbon, had been piled, out of her frustration, into the wooden scrap pail. Brave, fearless, DG faced it now. She knew where her skills lacked. Imagination painted her as a grand baker, pies as impressive as what Momster decorated the table with come Thanksgiving and birthdays. This corner of herself was never to shine.

Chimtu dashed ahead and into the misty garden. Across the grass of dew beneath the yellow and red leaves, DG pounded every last remnant of her cooking project to the compost. The worms would run in fear. On the returning path, she caught the wolf's tail diving into the underbrush. The copse had a lapse by design: the orchard entrance. The first sun, a fiery ball far in the remote galaxy, refracted on the hanging fog within the orchard, silhouetting the trees, their fruit, the ladder and baskets she had let sit out through the night of rain. All the birds hushed, and in the silence DG ascertained a hum.

She looked into her palm, for the hum was there, too. The light touched her.

Wyatt's story had to be true.

-x-

If she could not cook, she could peel.

Thirty minutes passed before Wyatt woke. An hour passed before Raw arrived. Two hours passed before Glitch roamed from bed, another half-hour as he roamed from the bath, and by then apples were cooking down and DG's hands were covered in sugar.

Glitch hopped to the counter. It faced two ways: into the home's only sitting room, and also into the tiny galley. He kicked his legs back and forth, mood cheery. Though he flinched as Wyatt patted his knee, leaving comment and taking Glitch's security.

"You're still alive."

"I am. Why do you think I'm in a chipper frame of mind?"

Unsure if she was the sort who could be teased about such things, Wyatt swept around DG. The same hand that touched Glitch's knee touched her elbow. "You just going to let him get away with that?"

Her slow smile, thin with truth and humour, proposed the silent enquiry. _What other choice do I have?_

"Well, Raw," Glitch accepted a bowl of hot oatmeal laced with apple, "are you here to help today, or have you come for other reasons?"

"Come to fix trail mix."

DG ducked beneath Raw's facetious scowl. Noticing the movement, Glitch blew on his morning stew.

"A girl needs to eat. But this kitchen's too small for three cooks."

"Raw doesn't need the kitchen," DG explained. She shoved herself over four steps, and still Wyatt, taking over the stove, was close. "He needs to go in the woods and hunt down berries and things."

A sputter into the spoon sent oatmeal down Glitch's chin. Raw handed him a napkin, but Glitch forgot why he'd been handed the napkin. The cloth found its way back to Raw.

"Oh, Raw, you have to take me with you! I love a good berry hunt! And if I stay here another minute, I'll turn into apple pulp." The phrase was given poignant dictation, if said rather aside, for the benefit of hassling Wyatt.

In the vines that grew, winding and binding his friends, Raw surveyed, calculated, delineated, and divined. "Glitch finish food, then we go."

Glitch slid from the counter, a wink tossed to DG. She saw, considered, and knew what would happen. Alone with Wyatt, for the morning, possibly the afternoon. She would have to make him talk or leave him to drown in all the weight of his misery. He seemed prepared to conquer it alone. Yet maybe that was what she saw in his eyes. He was prepared, though he knew that if he stepped alone, it would take him: he would lose.

-x-

The orchard cleared as the suns widened their arms, heightened their warmth. In the quiet, branches rattled and whispered as DG unburdened them of their reddish wares. How long her toiling continued, she failed to care. The earth lost its dew, and in the exhilaration of exertion, DG shed multiple layers: a barn jacket of Wyatt's, a cardigan, a sweater. One tree surrendered all it could, and she wound to the next, then the next. Her stomach growled and grovelled. _Do not eat an apple again,_ it begged her.

Wyatt was not inside as she entered. Apples had been left over low heat on the stove, and there was bread rising for the first or second time, she couldn't tell. A paring knife and a long row of the fruit to be skinned. No Wyatt, no note, no Chimtu. A heaviness hung in the atmosphere.

She circled the outside of the house, one corner to the other, in hopes of finding him. But he seemed lost, and even called his name. He did not answer, and even the trees were silent. DG turned into a sudden noise, a panting, and found herself on the receiving end of a pink tongue hanging, dark eyes watching. DG took one step, and Chimtu took two, then several: She led DG into the woods. The path took her to one of the crayfish pools, to the creek in a roaring rush after all the rain. Ferns and moss were greener and softer than ever. In patches of shadow, leaves and twigs still dripped. Along the shore, DG followed the wolf's muddy prints.

Chimtu stalled, stopped, and sniffed the edges of various rocks and boulders. If she caught Wyatt's scent, DG didn't know. The diligent wolf inspected where she could, leaving no fern neglected, no stone unturned. It was not the first time, or the last time, that DG linked conclusions on the oddness of Chimtu. A sixth sense, a sixth or a seventh, about the earth, the people—about Wyatt.

She knew where to find him. DG's faith grew.


	9. Beat Around the Bush

9.

**Beat Around the Bush**

-x-

Rocky cliffs came into view, and from there DG caught her bearings. The boulders, tiers of them, left her feeling small. Against their magnificence, she was a gnat, a fly, a mossy spore. She endeavoured to find beauty in the area, rather than searching for the mystic intelligence. It had a quality, intangible, fey, but ferocious and elemental, that disoriented, beguiled, abused.

Spinning on the spot, DG found Chimtu, high on a rock. The wolf owned this domain. Here, she was royalty. Her jowls were set to paws, and her lids lowered, bored of what she saw. DG wondered how this could be the end.

Water answered her question. A tiny gulch emptied into the creek shore. Its water was neither clear nor muddy, but rust-coloured, the ruby hue of a bloody rivulet. DG traced the trail to the niche of masonry on the underbelly of the cliffs. From the sluice pipe, at the deepest slant of the outdoor shower, came the same rush of water and rust.

"Wyatt."

In the dizziness of fear, DG used the wall of stones to guide her to the entrance, around the corner. Water ran, gentle as a rain shower, and the rust touched her feet.

"Wyatt?"

Her voice suffered in the weight of better noise. It must have, for he didn't hear. Less surprised by witnessing a nude backside, DG was more surprised at the words running through her mind: _More thin than lean, too thin, too colourless. We should've noticed…_ His pale form held the faintest hint of blue against the cool grey stones. He had tucked himself against the water, a cold DG could feel in the mist. The temperature would've been too much for her, but he withstood it. She stood there, watching and waiting and wondering if she should turn. Yet the blood was in the water. He seemed uninjured. He seemed, too, not to move.

In the last thought was the worry that hurled her forward. She reached beneath the icy droplets for his shoulder, damp and cool. Her eyes were caught, an intense blue to compliment the tense moment. DG searched the streams in the runnels of mortar. It indicated why she had found him. She examined him quickly, indifferently, for an injury that might explain. Nothing harmed him. In afterthought, embarrassed and suddenly fractious, DG turned off the water.

"I thought you were bleeding to death."

"Is that possible?"

"That you could bleed to death?"

"That you could think such a thing."

He reached for a towel and first dried his hair. DG rolled her eyes and felt herself, identically, blushing scarlet. The worried look of a frightened kitten nearly made him smile, and some time in the future it might make him laugh, when the time came for looking back. He stepped around the corner. DG, hands meeting her hips, knees trembling, throat thick, listened to the rustle of clothes, a belt buckle, and suspenders slapping into place. He tipped beyond the edge.

"Do you need a shower, DG? You smell all right to me, but you don't seem to keen on leaving either."

"I'm supposed to talk to you. I'm supposed to be drilling you for answers, Wyatt Cain."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

She was left then. In the distance, Wyatt's kissing noises to call Chimtu were heard. And all at once DG fumed, the spume of ire reaching a point it never had before. Released from the maze of the shower, mud kicked up behind her heels as she dashed down the shore. With Wyatt right in front of her, just a half-turn accomplished to face her, DG grunted and jumped. Unprepared, Wyatt fell, found himself pinned there by a windstorm force in the shape of a small woman.

"DG!"

"There's something wrong with you, Wyatt, and we want to know what it is! Why else would you think that _I'd_ think you're bleeding to death? Why are you so thin? You haven't always been this thin. And if you tell me it was all that time out with the cowboys, I'll _hurt_ you!"

"You couldn't hurt a fly!"

"I could too, if that fly was my best friend and keeping secrets, I'd knock him on the head with a frying pan if I had to! And don't you dare think I'm not capable of it! I am!" DG pinned his arms in her mighty hands, his torso with her knees. "If you don't tell me what's wrong right now, then I'll—I'll—"

"You'll what?"

"I'll tell Glitch that you don't want our help, and we'll go! And you can do the harvest and the faire by yourself!"

He stopped struggling. The childish look of immense anguish coming from his eyes was enough to make her cry.

"Oh, Wyatt, I'm sorry—sorry! I didn't mean— We wouldn't really… We wouldn't leave now. But we're frustrated," she continued. He had to know their perspective. "We're frustrated at you beating around the bush, you know! We're trying to help you, and you just cover our efforts with more cunning secrets. Or you glaze over things. Or you ignore it. No, you're not getting up."

She felt him twitch and held him in place. And part of her wanted to. The feel of his waist against the inside of her legs… The power she had. Should she sidle down a few inches, should she tilt her head another ten degrees, a side of his will would crumble. And then she felt herself give in, as if he had already tucked her into his arms, held her as he manoeuvred; her power would be forfeited to his. Her body shifted, somewhere on the inside, as if he'd already claimed her. DG remembered to talk before she acted, and one thing she meant to ask… She tightened her grip anew.

"Why did you let Glitch kiss you? Wyatt! Answer me!"

"I wanted to!"

"Why? If you were in love with him, why didn't you say so?"

"I'm not in love with him…" His sigh shuddered in the depth of his chest. He looked at the hand holding him, a small thing, thin, anything but meek. The fingers loosened enough so that he could curl his fingers around hers. He hardly saw her for the blear. "I am not in love with _just_ him. But I love him."

DG broke their connection. She rolled from him, into the mud and moss, and felt it cool against her hot shape. Wyatt stared fixedly into the canopy. From the corner of his eye, dampening pale lashes and lodging into distinguishing wrinkles, DG's thumb absorbed a tear.

"Is that what's bothering you? All this time…"

"I wondered what was wrong with me."

"Nothing's wrong with you."

"I don't mean that. Glitch has his own charms, you know. And you." His wide palm engulfed her cheek, went down, so fingertips brushed her mouth. They left behind a smile. "You're beautiful, bewitching… But I wondered what was wrong with me that neither one of you… Neither one of you would want me around."

"You were gone."

"And before that? And after that? And after the faire's over? No, DG, don't do that. Don't pretend it'll ever be the same. Don't pretend that either of you could ever love me."

"We do love you." She did the same to him: her fingers wound around his lips, across his chin, his neck, down the length of his chest. At the tuck of shirt into trousers, DG hesitated. She flirted with temptation, the consequences of if she did or didn't. If no movement ever arrived, she had words. "I do love you, Wyatt. You know that."

How did she love him? Was it now out of suggestion, out of pity? He could've coaxed it from her, the truth. If she hadn't hesitated, she could've coaxed it from him, the curse of the truth.

He gave her hand back to her. He made up her mind for her.

"You kissed Glitch," DG said remorsefully. "You won't even touch me."

"I will," Wyatt nudged her, breath against her face, before he rose, "when you beg me to. For now, DG, you know as well as I do that some fairy tales are true."

She was covered in the mire of the shore. The hollow weight of longing and tenderness inside now matched the outside. "In fairy tales, everyone lives happily ever after."

"Yeah, but the princess marries just once." He rubbed a smudge of dried mud from her chin. "No one splits her heart in two."


	10. Less is More

10.

**Less is More**

-x-

The orchard gave her a heavy moment. Doing nothing more than stretching out her fingers for one of the last apples free to take, the portent wound, noose-like, across her shoulders, around her neck, and twisted invisibly down to her hand. Fear strangled. Her breath halted but her heart quickened. She searched the edge of the orchard for a hundred eyes felt but unseen. On the branch, the fruit remained, untouched—and now unwanted.

With a hop, skirts flapping to her shins, she let go of the rung. The birds sang again, a balm in their winsome chorus.

A burning in her palm, and she ran a hand down a faint red mark, a superficial scratch from a splinter, a knob of a branch. It was the same spot where the Father had placed the stigmata, the one she had outgrown. But the light was still inside, the light that magic sensed. Untouched—and now unwanted.

The rustling of grass stems, the flash of a red coat, and DG met Glitch halfway. He yoked her with his arms and pressed lips against her forehead. "Sublime little oread, have you had a busy day?"

DG broke his hold but held him still. The intensity of her eyes worked as well as ropes. "There's something wrong with this orchard."

"Did it throw apples at you?"

"A different kind of wrong."

"You're right. Those trees are just mean. These, well, these…" He looked around, inspecting the boughs for himself. "Well, these—I don't know. They're old before their time."

"They whine and they groan and… They watch me. There's something here that has eyes and is watching me."

Glitch watched her, a smile that soothed and provoked. "I think you need to get more sleep."

"And I think you should listen to me. I think Wyatt's stories are true. The one about the orchard being from the flying folk—the fairies." She grabbed the last wooden pail of apples, tucked her arm to the crook of his elbow, and led him from the groping weight of newly weightless trees. "And there's something else. About Wyatt. He—"

DG searched Glitch's face for a continue sign. How to say it? How would she speak such a thing? Could she mime it, write it out, place it in a sonnet, a quatrain?

_Something this,  
something that,  
Oh Wyatt,  
Wyatt Cain…_

She wished she hadn't started such a topic. Suddenly, Glitch's adventure with Raw, picking berries to dry and nuts from trees without eyes was far more interesting than all the shooting stars of destiny, than words dithering before they had begun. DG found her hair kissed, that space above her ear, and soothing words whispered there.

"He'll have to tell me himself. I understand."

When Glitch said those words, she believed in the goodness of the world.

-x-

Raw leaned against a porch beam and seemed to growl at the round man's approach. As the wolf leapt to her paws, DG and Glitch passed from the orchard and into the eastern garden. They saw the stranger, stopped, and watched the scene play out from a safe distance.

"Who's that?" DG asked Glitch, should he know.

"How should I know?"

She wondered, sometimes, in moments like those, how she hadn't claimed the second half of his brain for her own. He urged cowardice to depart and spurned her forward. Before the man in a suit of light brown wool, Wyatt appeared from the house. The screen door snapped shut. He set a calming hand to the neck of the wolf, surveyed the position of one, and then of two.

"Good afternoon, Mr Sparrow."

"He's Mr Sparrow," Glitch hoarsely, quietly voiced to DG's lobe.

"Good, er, afternoon, Mr Cain. And, er—" Mr Sparrow fitted oversized glasses to the bridge of his nose, and, noticing the figure in the shadow, reclaimed a pace.

"This is Raw," Wyatt tossed his forehead in Raw's direction, then to the couple behind. "And that there's DG, and with her is Glitch. This is Mr Junius Sparrow. He's head of everything having to do with the Ashers Falls Harvest Faire."

Glitch gave cheerful greeting but dodged past, plenty of breadth. On the second step, DG lingered, intrigued by it all. A little speck of a man, like the top of grass gone to seed, balding, wizened. A hundred men like him she might've already met. But she hurried him, in the anxiety of her mind, and wished him gone. She wished to speak to Wyatt, to Glitch—and, should he choose to hear, to Raw. By the wandering of a sparrow, drenched in the downpour of authority, her plans had unhinged. She sensed, too, that Wyatt wished the same, and begged the wind rise and soar the sparrow away.

"You coming here for the inspection of the entrance certification?"

This went undeclared, as such answers may when one carries stamped and sealed papers in an old briefcase. Junius Sparrow dug with soft claws, found several sheets, a clipboard, a pen for marking. "You must have fifteen pounds of goods in order to attend the festival. Are you prepared to show me at least ten pounds worth of goods today, Mr Cain?"

Wyatt only nodded, complacent, composed, and willing to co-operate. While he was unruffled, DG rippled, annoyance lighting fires in her eyes, the fuses of her temper. Glitch tried smothering it with a look, _Not right now, DG_, before he turned. He went inside, behind Mr Sparrow, perhaps of better use keeping the stranger's nosiness distracted than keeping DG aligned.

She cuddled her knees against her, on the third porch step down. Chimtu marched the perimeter of her land, the intrepid guardian. At DG's side sat Raw. They glanced at each other, into the woods, then back again.

"Aren't we driving you crazy yet, Raw?"

Raw shook his head. His sanity was not the sanity poised at razor's edge. "In the end, the answers reveal themselves."

"Where is the end?"

"When the answer comes, that will be the end."

A solemn interpretation of this riddle lived but briefly. The back door slammed shut, a shudder of frustration poured through the house. A second later, Mr Sparrow, his clipboard, his briefcase, his round belly and short steps, stormed by them in a hurricane's blur. Too confused to move, DG didn't have to: Glitch returned, morose and rude.

"Mr Sparrow should learn to keep his beak shut. He is most definitely not a people person! Do you know what he said? He all but told Wyatt he was shooting himself in the leg entering this contest with just the two of us as helpers! Oh, no, Raw, don't give us your pity, or your pithy excuses as to why you don't want to be there. It's fine, it really is—and that's not the point of the thing! I'd never seen Wyatt so close to wanting to hurt someone smaller than him… You know, without the wings of vengeance perched on his shoulder. But if I hadn't been so surprised, I might've…"

"What did Mr Sparrow say? What did Wyatt say?"

The questions reformulated the whole of Glitch's response. DG had calmed, and he spoke with a silvery elixir on his tongue. "Mr Sparrow asked for the names of Wyatt's participants. Wyatt said your name, then my name. Mr. Sparrow waited for him. When Wyatt told him that was all, well, Mr Sparrow… The other vendors will have five to ten people _each_. Wyatt will have two. Just two. Mr Sparrow smiled haughtily, and haughtily wished Wyatt luck. It was a matter of family, Mr Sparrow said… The vendors bring their families, I guess. Wyatt said we are his family. After that, he had no other words to say. And Mr Sparrow left."

DG sought a quick answer from Glitch. "You or me?"

"It'll have to be one of us," he responded rapidly.

"Both of you," came from the low, thunderous purr of Raw. He waved them on their way. Wyatt waited, needing them, willing them to heal this ounce of stubborn loneliness.

At the beginning of the woods, with the path to the shore of Ashers Creek, Glitch and DG halted.

"Which way?"

Just ahead, DG glimpsed furry white legs, the bob of a grey tail, the form of Chimtu.

"I know where he is." She went after the wolf, and the wolf would lead her, as she had before, to Wyatt—should she not already know where among the rocks and stones, the ferns and woodland lilies, he hid.

"I hope Wyatt makes one more apple pie than needed to meet quota," Glitch began his anecdote in earnest.

"Why?"

"Because Mr Sparrow needs a pie in the face, that's why. How can he have such thoughts, in this day and age? Families are not created from blood any more than they are created from acorns, from acorns, from—" DG tapped him, "—and in this case, the three of us will be sufficient and speedy and—perfect. In this case, less is more. Less is exactly what Wyatt Cain needs."


	11. A Leopard Can't Change

11.

**A Leopard Can't Change Its Spots**

-x-

The emollient cascades, numerous over the tiny plinths frozen in the creek, provided the dulcet lullaby for the leafy arbours, the patches of ferns, the quilts of purple asters and alabaster fleabane, to create for Wyatt Cain a haven unmatched. Chimtu claimed him first, claimed a spot at his thigh, as he sat on a slate slope, the prevalent carpet of moss mottling the grey, the lay between his fingers, splayed to support himself.

If they came to his rescue, he ignored the threat, physical, mental, from the feazings of a rain cloud. In the house, before he'd rushed out, a coat and hat were left behind. An everyday cotton shirt, worn on the range as well as the orchard, had been marred by mud up and down the sleeve, the brunt at the elbow. This was an inconsistency Glitch marked. And a consistency tagged visually: he'd noted the same on DG. Mud on her skirt, the sweater hem, the coal tresses just at the end.

He wondered what he'd missed. But he swiped a hand in the air, eyes on Wyatt, with a touch of insight and mist in them.

"You should not have let him upset you like that. It's wrong to place yourself on the wrong side of the faire's duke, and you know it. Granted," Glitch showed his heartfelt view with greater conviction than the intended punishment, "he should not have said what he did. It was more wrong of him. But he's cheap, cheap in spirit and cheap in intelligence, and vastly cheap in all the places that matter. You should've—"

"I should've slugged him in the mouth," Wyatt said, staring into the lay of trunks, some white, some brown, one with a red squirrel running down, "that's what I should've done."

Regarding DG helplessly, Glitch lifted his shoulders. He urged her, with the tilt of his head, to near Wyatt and speak with him, in some clandestine form that she had tried earlier, perhaps, if that was the secret of the muddy tracks. But she shook her head a bit, hesitant. She also thought, too, of the scene by the shore, the imprint of her body and Wyatt's in the mire, the way its cold had touched her, and how Wyatt hadn't…

Sighing, Glitch reached for her fingers, and they only separated as they knelt, one on either side of Wyatt. DG had disturbed Chimtu, but the wolf scaled the tier, as though her time to bring comfort had passed.

"I don't pretend to understand what's going on in that thick head of yours," started Glitch; he had a way of starting, of unravelling, that brought them together by seemingly tearing them apart. "But how you think the three of us are going to handle the selling of goods to three thousand people estimated to attend the faire this year, I don't know, and it's not important. If you think we can do it, then we'll do it."

"We know the faire's important to you." DG suspected Wyatt was listening. Her fingers coiled behind the crook of his knee, to test, to see if he sank in her words, drowned, or floated in them. "And now we know it's even more important to you."

He held her hand, and in the squeeze of her fingers lingered the promise of earlier. She hadn't told Glitch, that was his position, the duty of his derelict, reluctant tongue, but that was another matter. The faire belonged to all of them. The affair that held them together. If anything kedged their friendship to the fathom it might drown, that would arrive the day after tomorrow, at faire's end.

"You are my family, both of you."

Glitch brightened his grin at Wyatt's expression. A tease could've followed, a mockery of Wyatt's dimly clever execration, though he was mute, struck dumb, by the sentiment. He found a soft spot to place his cheek, and there rested on Wyatt's shoulder. "You don't have to say things like that."

"Things like what?"

"Things you don't really mean."

Wyatt threw him a contemptuous look unseen. From the gloaming of temper, DG rose valiantly.

"We really aren't your only family, Wyatt," she said, purpose in her tone. "You have Raw, too."

"And Meria," added Glitch. "So the woman can't cook, but at least she knows how to stew apples and can! I love DG," he gestured helplessly to the figure swallowed in a sweater, who was used to the affectionate ridicule, "and she can't cook."

"Meria's kind of odd, though she seems pretty fond of you. We all are…" But DG's massive blue eyes wouldn't end there the prod of his soul. That would be too easy, and he wasn't anticipating ease. "And then there's Jeb."

Glitch felt Wyatt freeze. He snapped up his head, the formation shattered, and he shuddered. The invisible frost of a northern wind had shortened autumn just then. "Where is Jeb? You know, you so rarely talk about him…"

"He's fine." Wyatt made the statement: two words that he did not want maimed, discoloured, fouled beyond their profound imprecision.

"Fine," Glitch repeated with a laugh to hide the information sorted. He lifted in his graceful way, twirled halfway at the edge of the tier, then filled the halfway twirl to enclose one side of Wyatt, and the far side of DG. "Fine—as in he's fine living his own life? Or fine as in—"

"He doesn't even know where you are," DG suddenly accused. She gawked, unbridled, horrified, confused. "Wyatt! You never told Jeb you were coming to live here! This strange, strange little place out in the middle of nowhere! You should've told him!"

Against this argument, be it breakable or formidable, he couldn't yet be sure, he tilted. The slight lean into her, and DG reconsidered what she had said.

But Wyatt goaded, and from the silent argument, he pulled at a long thread. "Why would that be important? If Jeb wants to live his life elsewhere, am I supposed to stop him? I wrote him letters while I was gone. Never got an answer."

"You've been through an ordeal," Glitch murmured. He hadn't forgotten, and he doubted any of them would. "Maybe he needs time to think about what he's seen."

"He did witness a lot in a short span of time," DG thought this a hopeful line, saturated in truth as much as hope could ever be.

"That's just the thing…" Wyatt allowed the phrase to burn out there. The suns were separating on their race to the horizon, and shades of blue and pink began to cover the west. He thought about Jeb, the letters written, some of them burned, a few of them sent. "We all witnessed a lot in a short period of time. The two of you were the only ones who came out of it without an injury. You had each other."

"That was an accident," Glitch announced, shaking his head. His sad gaze passed to DG, then to Wyatt, and his heart felt too heavy to hold, to show, like a red box someone had decorated in lead. "I left her and roamed for a long while. You know that. I only went back because I missed her. You never know what a lily really smells like until you smell it in her hair. She was kissed by moonlight, and then I had to kiss her. It was an accident… The whole thing."

"He's telling the truth." The lids lowered over bulbous eyes, and she cradled Wyatt's arm, his responsive hand. At the back of her neck, a set of lips, an apology in Glitch's tiny kiss. But it was the truth.

"Hearts don't land where they do just on accident," Wyatt told them. "That's what the two of you keep forgetting. Everyone has a choice. Jeb made his, and he'll go on making it, every day he watches the suns rise, every night he watches them set—wherever he is. And I'll go on making my choice. A leopard can't change its spots. Even if I did, that wouldn't make me the man I'm supposed to be today, tomorrow, or the day after."

"Of course not," soothed Glitch. "No one wants you to be anything right now."

"Just Wyatt," DG said.

Glitch sat, back to Wyatt, a warmness pressed against his hair. "And wherever you cast your heart, that's where you'll want to be. Don't look before you throw it. Just throw it. It'll land."

Wyatt spoke aloud that he thought he already had. "Now what do I do?"

"Wait for it."

The solemn eyes of a princess flowed into his inquisitive sea. Her smile trembled, but she understood, and Glitch, and then he did. He knew…

The two of them waited, hands outstretched.


	12. With a Grain of Salt

12.

**With a Grain of Salt**

-x-

They were insomniacs that night, fed by their preparedness anxiety, their fear of each other, the wonder of themselves.

Wyatt would not permit DG to enter the kitchen unless it was on business, and only then if she touched nothing, unless it was one of them. He only allowed Glitch to suffer under his authority. It was only the three of them. They'd returned from their sojourn, of hearts and of feet, to find that Raw had left a note, had gone, and would see them on faire day. Glitch's meticulousness worked best pouring their laborious concoctions into new houses. The countertop, the table, both were covered in the bluish glint of glass. DG ceased to venture into the kitchen, as Wyatt brought her work to do. She was at an old table set up in front of the fire-bellied stove, out of their way, master of her own. Yet the three of them were able to converse. Insurmountable walls two years old were invisible to hours bought by twilight.

Jars flourished under DG's artistic touch. Some bows, a touch of gingham, a label in calligraphy, and then housed in a crate, in a bed of straw. The apple butters and sauces, the peach jellies, the stewed plums, the combination of harvest delicacies, DG chuckled at them, neat from her handiwork, tidy in their compact rows. Such inanimate things were far more ready for the faire than the souls responsible for their creation.

At a break in the routine, Wyatt left Glitch and DG alone. She set fists to hips and stared at Glitch. He knew the course of her thoughts but not the words in her eyes.

"What's going to happen?"

It wasn't that he hadn't read the words, but that there were none. "I don't know. But I know I love you."

"I love you, too. Why does that have to change?"

"It doesn't. It never will. Or it already has in the slightest degree, a variable of a change that means we've changed with it. But…" He draped the alteration there, a timid, fretful thing for her to bat at like a kitten entertained.

DG sighed, resigned to not play as he wished. She breathed the name, and he had, as he had before, as he might again, shift the world around them. "Wyatt…"

"Both of us love him, too. I thought I told you not to kiss him."

"I didn't." If she confessed once, she confessed again. "I wanted to. He wouldn't. Wouldn't touch me. Said he wouldn't…"

"He wouldn't." Glitch blinked slowly; his palate tasted this.

"Said he wouldn't until I begged."

He laughed alone. "Of all the vain, obtuse, reckless things for him to say!"

"You're only irritated because he already acts like he knows me." DG skulked into the forbidden kitchen, beside Glitch, formidable in his crown of power, the one she had donned him with from the first stolen moment, the last lie that had brought them to Wyatt's place. The weight at her hips reminded her of how it had been, what it always would be. She didn't need to explain her remark. He'd already defined it. He cackled, an ornery snide, and fed her an apple wedge.

"You are quite insatiable. Is that your youth? I always wondered. It couldn't possibly be me. I'm just like an old clock, DG, and must be wound in order to go for hours and hours, otherwise I fade and my hands stop, I stop altogether, and the chime won't tell you what you need to know. It would take two of us, wouldn't it, to keep your bedroom desires fed. Between us, I'm sure Wyatt and I have enough stamina to keep you happy, if I'm not able to do it alone, of course. He could step in. That's what he does. He takes over the dance when the proper gentleman has fled—I'm not giving you any suggestions," he hastily added, pressing fingertips to her lips, "only saying that the gears in this old clock are weathered, practised, and still have a lump of an idea or two. The strange thing?"

"Other than your whole analogy about the clock? I can't imagine."

"I'm not jealous. I'm prepared." He poked her in the side, playful, childish. She brought out the vim in him. "You have never begged for anything, would you ever beg for that?"

Verbiage had escaped, and she was left mute but with a shrug and a shake. She couldn't imagine how she would, then couldn't foresee a time when she wouldn't. And earlier, she thought it might've been days instead of hours, that morning, the way Wyatt felt beneath her. The thought of his hands on her skin… She tossed the thought into the infinitesimal above. A lover she already had, already a secret. How would she keep two? With Glitch it had always been the mischievous side of passionate, raucous fun, a chance to laugh, to love, and the only complication was the nest of lies. It was built to suit the delicate gossamers of a family rebuilding. Now that, too, had become a cheapened overcoat scarring the lies.

"Glitch?"

"H'mm?"

"When we get home, I want to tell everyone about us."

"That is something we should let fate do. What we can preclude and what we can tell may cancel the other very soon. On this, best not to make up our minds just yet." Glitch wondered about them: the end of this scene, the end of this act. Before DG told the world about the workings of her heart, she first had to return home with the same heart. Both of them did.

It stung to have her opinion governed thus. During a close nestle, embraces exchanged, she tried to forgive him, only to realise no guilt loitered. Their affections rested, a cosmic rope fused together, ended to end, forever. And though constant, it grew, and soared to find where love must be waiting, and give it then. Wyatt's heart, one day, would have to land.

Hearts were fragile kaleidoscopes: fixed on many things, always changing colours, always changing light, and always distorting the image just beyond the lens.

He didn't know how they would get through the night.

-x-

Excitement permitted limited hours of sleep. DG woke on the couch to the chatter of birds and the footsteps of Wyatt. There came a second voice, Glitch, to her surprise. He rarely rose so early. He roused her, handed her tea, prattled animatedly, cheerfully. They were heading to Meria Maddigan's during what was left of the morning and into the afternoon, to give her samples of what had kept them enslaved. She had taught them all they had learned, taught it in one day before moving on, like an apparition, and they had conquered the world of canning and baking after the fundamentals.

If DG could not be proud of her cooking, she could at least be proud to hand over that first jar of apple butter. She thought it must be pride. Not fear, though the blue-collared vulture breathed heavily and leered.

The witch's tower was a strange place, an energy, a vibration that brought out the heat of light in DG's hands. She couldn't sit still, even as they were given tea and biscuits at an herb-covered kitchen table. DG's senses spiked. She soared upward, dashing the salt shaker with a clumsy wrist. Apologies streamed from her. Meria waved a hand and reached for a broom.

"Don't upset yourself, DG." If she ever made hints that she comprehended the meaning of a princess, she never said such a frivolous thing. It was not in her grandiloquence, but it was in her respect. "Take the spilled salt with a grain of salt."

DG excused herself, asking permission to walk the grounds, and if she should avoid any of the unusual creatures. But Meria grinned, fulsome, beguiling, and would not say. "You will know friends from strangers. Luck has always guided you that way."

With the broom put away, the salt cleaned, the shaker back in place, Meria saw Wyatt toiling his gaze out the door's screen. DG waded through the field, the grass as high as her boot tops, with Chimtu her companionable guide.

"You should tell her," said Meria, a tone unarguable, ripe with the rigidity of her spirit. She bobbed her head at Glitch, who'd stopped stacking spoons and heather bits and sugar cubes to gaze at her hard, calculatingly. "And you should tell him."

Wyatt turned, and Glitch set on him.

"Tell us what?"

The lids of Wyatt's eyes narrowed. Yet he reached for Glitch, found him there, and held him close. The stillness of their bodies expressed the sorrow of their breath.

"I will tell you later."

"How much later? An hour from now? When we get back to the house? A letter in two years? Wyatt, what is it? Meria?" He tried to wrench it from her, the element of surprise. Wyatt's palm coaxed him back. With a quick kiss, he relented. But out of Wyatt wafted the aroma of mystery; the heavy veil of silk that kept mysticism and magic in had been perforated, rent, nothing but threads.

"The orchard. DG was right." Glitch's delicate caress wandered, from chin to brow and neck. "She said your stories are true. She knows magic when she sees it. She feels it there. Something watching her."

Meria set their arms bowing apart, her intensity to blame, her urgency necessary. She raked Wyatt, and gone was any sense of vanity and pride. He knew the dangers. "You must make up your mind. You must. Before they succumb, too. Then all of you will be lost."

Glitch's eyes sparkled in teary dew. "What's she talking about? Wyatt?" His waist was patted a final time.

"Get DG," commanded Wyatt. "It's time for us to go."

The demand was carried out. Later was coming. During the hike home, later was on its way.


	13. A Picture's Worth

13.

**A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words**

-x-

Wyatt passed the orchard, a dreamy, mist-filled place. Leaves fell against the soggy hues of the setting suns, blanched blue and orange and red. He looked from the smarmy glen to each friend, the sting rising, the one that had been there, unchangeable, unable to manifest, since they came.

He grabbed their hands and led them into the house. Coats were shed, left on the hook inside the door, lanterns lit, the fire set. In the low light, the pools of darkness hollow at the room corners, Wyatt faced them. The quiet kept them safe from thoughts unpredictably dangerous.

"I'll tell you a few things, but I'm half afraid to do it. Not because I don't trust you, not because…"

Wyatt huffed, massaged his brow once, a hand across his hair. The look he gave them, sheer despair, and DG fluctuated. It was Glitch who acted on her desire. His arms embraced Wyatt tenderly, his face to a broad shoulder, his eyes closed. DG was invited in, and found a space for herself beneath Wyatt's other arm. The three of them together, their friendship sacred, and more than that. Glitch and Wyatt were all her heart knew, and all it ever needed to claim.

"It's this place."

She'd heard Glitch say so before, in private, never to Wyatt. In the tension following, how would Wyatt react? Agree or discord—or was it a path in the middle, between truth and assumption? His breath tickled her face and moved a curl of Glitch's hair.

"It's this place."

-x-

That night, he told them nothing more. Dawn would come too early, he averred, and they had to rise with the first ascent of the first sun, to prepare for the faire.

But neither left Wyatt. The loft was softly edged in night, nothing but starlight streaming through the windows, and clerestories bestowed in moonbeams, and Wyatt lay awake, wishing for a dream, and finding himself awake for it. Up the staircase, step after step, arrived Glitch.

"Whatever it is, Wyatt, you will defeat it." Glitch poised himself beneath a blanket and quilt, next to Wyatt's warmth. His eyes danced at the guile, the fortuity, the firecracker ignited during the tempestuous storm. He might've laughed, had it been a touch funnier, if Wyatt had touched him at all, if it hadn't been for the hesitation, the sag in a smile of sadness untold. He read the story and hummed it away in his throat. "She knows I'm up here. She knows, if you need permission." The heat of Wyatt's fingers trailed along his cheek, his jaw, a glide down his neck, and sweep across his collarbone. Glitch teased him. "Are you going to let your fingers have all the fun?" To invite a little more, the tip of his nose met with Wyatt's, a rub back and forth. Wyatt's limited reaction was not voluntary. Glitch felt the change in the heat, the erratic pause of breath.

"One kiss," was all Wyatt said, but blocked Glitch's mouth with a forefinger. "One kiss, Glitch, I mean it. I won't have us staying up all night."

"Oh, passion knows no boundaries, Wyatt, honestly! Besides, you forget who you're dealing with."

"Have I?"

"I can make a kiss last forever."

"Some night when we don't have to be up at four-thirty in the morning, I'd be more than willing to test that. But, Glitch—"

"Obligations first, sex second. I get it. Are you going to kiss me, or shall I just go ahead and invite DG? Since we're having a strictly kissless slumber party—and you do have the most enormous bed, Wyatt. Did you think Chimtu would have puppies or something?" Glitch rolled away before Wyatt stole his kiss. Down the chute, he bellowed for DG, then hopped back to the mattress. Ever playful, deliberate, radical, passionate, Glitch sat over Wyatt, cupped his chin, and kissed him deeply. He sated one treasonous scent of longing, only to instigate another.

As DG arrived, boyish in her flannel pyjamas, Glitch kept her delicate hands in his and guided her to the bed. She was, somehow, tangled in the middle, offered blankets, coddled and cared for. Not like a child, not so primly, but as a being they loved, cherished, like Sappho among roses. She closed her eyes, drifted to slumber, Wyatt on one side, Glitch on the other, and forgot, for the first time in two annuals, that she was a princess.

-x-

"I have never seen this many people." DG yawned and rubbed a white hand over a drawn face. She was carting their second load from the back of the wagon, a couple of wooden folding chairs, from the crowded lot of grass, filled with cars and carts, to downtown Ashers Falls, the site of the faire. "Well, once I saw this many, but that was back at the Kansas State Fair. Nothing like this."

"And these are just the vendors," said Wyatt. Despite the hours of rest, and Glitch had known, without a doubt, that Wyatt had slept, he was barely energetic, and the burden, the toil, the great cumbrance held him. He had to get through this day. This day, and then he could cut the pinions.

As the booth began to take shape, and all the mason jars and all the pies and all the goods were spread upon the tabletops, Mr Junius Sparrow, clipboard and bow-tie clad, swooped round to check on them. The formality paid, and he left them, with a tart breath uttering "Good luck with the contest."

"Contest?" echoed DG. She smacked Wyatt on the arm. "You didn't tell us this was a _contest_!"

"Didn't I?"

The innocent expression, the jaunty angle of his worn hat, his unshaved chin childishly shapeless, and above it all the daring gleam of humour. The corner of his mouth rose.

And that was it. The first time they laughed. Wyatt began it, with a chuckle singed in relief. Glitch followed through. His arm went around DG's waist, and she caught his contagion. They recognised the sanctity of laughter—their laughter, three different voices in one strand of magic—and melded together. Wyatt blessed each of their mouths. It took neither of them by surprise. That was their moment, their emotions meeting as one, and it alone propelled the day's momentum.

-x-

Two hours before the close of the faire and the announcement of the contest winners, DG, Glitch and Wyatt sold all their goods. Raw and Meria Maddigan arrived, and laughter, good spirits, and happiness continued. In less than forty minutes, with the help of the viewer and the good witch, the booth was packed. The quintet spent the last hour as visitors. Each bought another a present: a scarf, a hat, mittens among miscellaneous kitchen supplies and household wares.

"Please don't let me buy any food," DG warned as they roamed. She beamed at the next booth over. "Oh, look, popcorn balls!"

Each nibbled the odd object, which neither Wyatt nor Glitch had ever heard of or tasted, as they stood before the stage, amassed with the hordes. The commissioner of Ashers Falls, one of the richest merchants of town, officially closed the faire, just as she had officially opened it at eight that morning. Pointy-nosed Mr Sparrow, reminding DG of a flightless bird, like a penguin, handed to the commissioner the tallied results of the judges.

Polite applause were given to Crane Crook Farm as winner of best mince pie, to Old Tree Orchard for best ketchup, and a host of other categories. Then came to stewed fruit, and that was the first time they heard "And best in show goes to Little Orchard…" But the clapping fell, subdued, and Wyatt stood, gaping at the two of them.

"What was that for?" he said under his breath. The commissioner had moved on to another category. Glitch was about to tell him, but "Little Orchard" was heard again, and he brought his hands together.

Several more merits poured in: best cobbler (orchard fruit), best cobbler (berry), best apple butter, best apple (old fashioned), best apple tart, best apple dessert (original recipe), most original apple dessert recipe (Glitch thanked Wyatt's grandmother), and best vendors overall.

The last category, best overall, was the highest honour the Ashers Falls Harvest Faire bestowed. It offered nothing but notoriety and a photograph taken with the commissioner. Hand in hand, Wyatt stepped to the stage with his two friends—his family. There was a flare of light, a wisp of smoke, a crack—and the faire ended, all the better for their boast.

-x-

In the back of the wagon, DG and Glitch were coiled under a shared blanket. Wyatt drove the horse down the familiar road. The last of the crickets chirped sleepily in the brush. The stars were turning, Glitch said, to show their autumn fashions. He pointed out constellations, told her fables, whispered her name and kissed her ebulliently.

"I can't wait to see that photograph. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I bet ours will hold a novel's worth of words—however many that is—but I suppose it's far, far more than a thousand. Isn't it fantastic that we—that _he_ won?"

DG nodded, already tucking her head beneath his chin. Fantastic, yes, yet she felt hollow, and the casing at her heart felt numb. She wished Raw and Meria hadn't gone—and then, briefly, she was grateful it was just the three of them again.

The faire was over. The orchard had served its purpose. But had it got what it wanted? Did it want more?

She glanced at Wyatt. Glitch fixed her line of sight. His arms tightened. He was holding her, and she was holding him. Both wished to hold Wyatt and carry him to the end.

"He has to make his own choice."

"I know," DG responded. "I want him to know we love him. I want to keep him, like he's a stray. I want him to follow us all the way home. Wherever home is now."

"He'll decide."

The statement lashed her in congruency. It established what their hearts had decoded before. Wyatt wouldn't follow them home.

It was Wyatt they would follow.

DG closed her eyes and sighed against Glitch's chest. "I love you."

"I love you, too. Always."

"And always."


	14. Read Between the Lines

14.

**Read Between the Lines**

-x-

The night had turned cold in the higher elevation where cabin and orchard stood. Wyatt's breath plumed before him, and icy mists formed slippery, gauzy ropes at forest's edge, as he puffed his way back from the stable. The horse was the only thing he put away that night. The rest lay covered in the back of the wagon. As far as he knew, tomorrow would come, chores would be done, and the mundane could always wait.

Inside, he found Glitch roasting his paws before the stove, and DG untying her boots to massage aching feet. Both waited, facing him, for whatever it was that had to be said or done or instigated.

Instead of thanks, he gave them what they had asked for since they arrived. He gave them the reason.

"Alec Little was a friend of mine."

He drew them into the winter of his words. They sensed the steering of voice, the shift of ice and cold deep within.

"He became a Longcoat. Betrayed the Resistance. And, by the end, he hated me. Schuyler didn't—she had no idea. She thought it was a gift, that the orchard would end their woes. It didn't… She failed to live long enough to see the evil of the flying folk. But they are nefarious. Alec joined the Longcoats because this orchard made him something he wasn't. It cursed him—the trees and the house and the constant debt to whoever they are, the ones who own it, run it. It's theirs, really. It'll never be anyone else's. I told you two before that Alec died in the war. It's partially a lie. He died during the war, not because of it. He destroyed himself, went mad. He left me this place, something he hoped would be his final revenge."

"If you knew all of this," DG barrelled upon him, furious and frightened, "then why stay here? Live here? Do what you did? The faire, Wyatt—"

"It wouldn't make any difference, DG, whether I walked away or stayed. And the faire was just an excuse to get the two of you back to me as soon as I could get you here."

"You could've just asked us…"

"I did ask you." He held her shoulders. The vitality in her imbued his wits. "I asked you, and you're here… They'd find me. You know they're out there. You can feel them."

She quickened her breath and hugged herself. Glitch confirmed it.

"She said she felt like the trees were watching her. I didn't know… Wyatt?"

He eyed Glitch, then DG. The image of his horrified friends pierced and seared. "I'll take care of it, Glitch. I promise."

"How?" pressed DG. "If Alec couldn't do it…"

"I'm a whole lot stronger than Alec. They won't take me down with them. I won't go. The two of you keep me here. You've kept me sane. It was only because Alec forgot how to love that they were able to take his daughter, take back their land, and take him, too. He didn't love anything. I do. That's the difference. And tonight, I'm going to put a stop to it—for good."

Biting her lips, DG spied Glitch, and he her, and conviction from Wyatt guided their trust in him.

She found her argument, the one thread. "What did I see that day—in the water? I thought you were bleeding."

"It's the mortar and the stone. People round here call that slate bloodstone."

"Oh, I've heard of that!" exclaimed Glitch. "It has a high iron content."

This assuaged one vine of fear, and left another. For DG, not all had submitted to clarity. "Then why are you so thin and pale and not yourself? And don't say it's from being with the cowboys."

Amid the drama, Wyatt snickered. He went behind her, lassoing her waist, capturing her against him. "Would you believe it's been from the worry?"

DG doubted, and Glitch didn't.

"Worry! Oh, tell me about it! Ever since DG and I started romping through the shadows, I think I've lost three inches from my waist—and I have lots more grey hair. Just think of what you have to look forward to, Wyatt, when you start romancing the girl. You're no more suitable for her than I. What?" He read DG's frown. "He isn't! And you know it! So does he! Why lie about it?"

Flushed and buried beneath the suddenness of it all, DG sequestered herself in the corner. A support beam cooled her cheeks, her hands. She hadn't thought about it before… What would happen tomorrow?

"Glitch?"

He pivoted to the plaintive tone, answering with his own. "Yes?"

"If you stay with him, I'm staying, too."

"DG, you…" The readiness roused his paternal side. Yet he was sure she knew the consequences. She couldn't make mistakes if she endured the consequences. He repeated a phrase they had earlier understood. "He has to make his own choice."

"Tomorrow, all of it might be confusing again, anyway."

Glitch and DG, startled by Wyatt's stoic adage, glare and teetered. Wyatt nodded. The right decision was within his grasp. The air crackled. The orchard's heaviness tugged at the captured nodules of his spirit. It wasn't so willing to let him go.

"In a little while, I'll go out into the orchard—alone. And I'll talk to them. They're waiting for me to do it, decide if I'm going to fight or give in. I haven't given them an answer—not officially—but with the two of you here, they might already suspect that I won't be going down so easily. If I win, I don't know what I'll be like tomorrow. All of this has changed me. I'm not who I was. In the morning, I'll be someone else, too. If I lose, I won't be here at all. Don't the two of you go making up your minds or your hearts about me right now. That's not called for. But I want you to know it means something to me that you were thinking about it at all, thinking about staying with me, and loving me," he swallowed a rush of tears, "like that."

The quiet had the energy he'd read between the lines of poetry once as a young man. Euphemisms, metaphors, conjunctions, conjoining. In a vague slant of the world, in the rush of heat among them, Wyatt saw a look exchanged, words unsaid, with consent therein and a declaration given. Glitch glided to him, temperance in the tempest. The back of his hand glazed from Wyatt's thigh to his belt, agonisingly slow, the welcome torture, a worthy promise to donate. And Glitch didn't stop until their hands were palm to palm.

"Where are we going?" Wyatt thought he'd ask, being carted, urgently tugged along.

"Don't ask me like you don't know."

Wyatt did know. The two of them passed DG, standing still, corporeal but subdued. Glitch paused and touched her chin.

"You can wait—"

"I'll be up in a minute," she said, smiling but turning away. She heard them trundle up the staircase, the sudden burst of Glitch's laughter, as she ran into the bathroom. She pressed her forehead to the closed door. Her stomach knotted a thousand times its width. Nerves had made her sick. With the light on, she watched herself in the mirror. Her heartbeat was quick, her lips too red, her eyes too glassy. She promised she wouldn't grow faint or flicker or fade before one of them. They were her favourite—of all the men and women she had ever met. And she was more to them, too, than beauty and body.

The door flew in. DG gasped and jumped. Staring and assessing, Wyatt stood, intuitive.

"DG, don't listen to Glitch. You do what you want."

"I'm just nervous." She murmured it, embarrassed. "I finally get used to being with one guy—and now there's two—I can be nervous. Excited—but nervous."

"Nervous." The nod was weak but assuring. "I think we've covered that."

"If you'd rather be with Glitch…" The idea sounded absurd. Wyatt tilted his head, measuring once more, and drew it out of her. "You said you wouldn't touch me unless I begged. What if I didn't? Or… I don't know… What if I did?"

Wyatt excluded her own hesitancy and reached for her. She had become necessary, the way she cared for Glitch, for him; the way she flared like suns against stars. He longed to be drenched in her scent, from hair and skin and everywhere. His fingers brushed her at the waist, a button undone at the bottom of a thin cotton camisole. Shuddering and enthralled, bold and daring, DG leaned forward, her thigh and waist touching his. A move she hadn't imagined doing with anyone but Glitch. The spare caress from nape and up her neck, she held her breath once, soon to let it go. The look of longing and sorrow in him washed away, she saw the last of it as he claimed her mouth with his. She tasted apples, honey, and somewhere in there a little bit of Glitch, and she searched deeper for a hint of Wyatt. She found it just as he pulled away.

"You have to win," she told him.

"I will."

"Don't lie to me."

"I won't. Are you still nervous?" Wyatt ensnared her, almost vicious in his grip. "Don't lie to me."

"I won't. And I'm not."

He murmured something, she could hardly hear what. It was blurred beneath her exclamation. She'd been lifted across his shoulder, and in this manner carried up the stairs. The whole way, DG never stopped laughing, and laughed loudest when Wyatt dropped her on the bed. He pointed to her, and spoke to a surprised Glitch.

"I brought us a present."

Glitch petted her tumbled, tousled locks, his hand gentle, the touch of his fingers a familiar weight. He was slight, airy, aquiline and diminutive, compared to Wyatt. But he was quick, lightning quick, and gods should have such wit.

"Do I get to unwrap it now or later? Or do you—?" This to Wyatt as he gesticulated to DG. She wanted to explain Glitch's manner of affectionate persuasion.

"Unwrapping me is his favourite part."

"Every night." Glitch began the tradition. The blouse, striped and cream, smelling of a bonfire and apple cores, moved from her shoulder, collar and skin exposed. The perfect place to leave a kiss. "Usually from the inside out. Stockings first, but tonight she's already done that. Alas. You'll learn the trade, Wyatt. It's not tradition, exactly. Every night is a new gift, something unexplored. I can't tell if she's adventurous or just looking for a little more. But she's my girl, and I'll love her to the bitter end…"

Wyatt was convinced. And all the things he'd spoken to DG revived and renewed. She couldn't split her heart in two—they couldn't expect it—neither one of them should.

But Glitch and DG smiled, the tone of conspiracy coloured there. Glitch crawled across the bed to Wyatt, standing at the foot. With the heels of his feet, Glitch grappled Wyatt at the back of the knees. A simple suggestion, a tightening of muscles, and Wyatt toppled. Beside him, Glitch sprawled, an industrious leg pinning Wyatt in place. He rubbed the height of Wyatt's brow, rubbing away the tortures, the stress, and kissing in love.

"Don't worry, Wyatt. My heart is big enough for two. Is yours?"

He held Glitch's jaw, sharply, a contradiction to the whisper of his voice. "Until the bitter end. Deege?"

"H'mm?" She glanced at him, then continued with her survey. "I didn't hear what you said. I was trying to figure out how to unwrap you." From across the prone, lean form of Wyatt, DG smiled at Glitch. "Stockings first?"

"Inside out, absolutely." Glitch agreed fervently. "Stockings first. Just tell him your heart is his, do that first."

Like an absolute fool, giddy and delighted, yet doused in wisdom, DG grappled Wyatt by the hand, kissed the palm, and placed it to her breast. "You didn't need the orchard to bring us here, Wyatt, or to get us to fall in love with you. All the fruit is gone now, thankfully, and when we wake up in the morning, it won't be to the scent of baking apples. The bitter fruits of our toil and your suffering will be gone, too. But I'll still love you."

"Until the bitter end?" he asked, folding his fingers with hers, and adding Glitch's in his other hand.

"Until the bitter end," DG vowed, "and beyond."

The sigh Wyatt released exposed the delicate hints of blossoming relief. After a moment, Glitch leaned over, puckered his lips, and extinguished the candle wick. In the total darkness, their movements were imprecise, but they paced themselves to the shift of the moons. The passion was there, but slow, unbound, the fall of innocence and the rise of love. Glitch returned to what he knew, to practice his skill on Wyatt as well as DG. And she found her own feast, the one unrealised since meeting Wyatt in the shower, since the tumble along the muddy shore. She released the hem of his shirt, leaving the belt for Glitch to undo, and swooped skin against the cool waves of Wyatt's abdomen. But with dawn miles away, Glitch and she tarried, lingered; they coaxed, teased and betrayed good intentions. When Wyatt neared a frenzy, their control ended, and it was quickly apparent that their bodies were, for the rest of the night, entirely his. He commanded them so effortlessly, they were powerless, and, manoeuvring DG in front of him, Glitch behind him, the latter made a joke that it seemed as though he'd done this before.

"As though you'd tell us if you had." Glitch bit into a muscular shoulder when Wyatt's hand forced the heat of flesh into him. It was better to bite than wail in ecstasy. In the passing of Wyatt's nearly inhuman sounds came the shuddering of DG's breath. In a moment of stillness, the passing of friction, Glitch finished his statement. "I think you've lived a very interesting and sexually noble life, Wyatt. You'll have to tell us about it someday. An exploit here, a tantalising nude scene there—oh dozens of stories. And—ow! Sorry, I meant ow in a good way. Being naked, there had better be only a good ow."

Wyatt tucked his head nearer to DG. She was groggy from happiness, though far from worn with it. The tips of his fingers slipped their way down the fine hairs of her arm, to her wrist tucked between them, to the damp of her and the swell of him.

"Does he always talk this much?"

Her grin broadened. "Sometimes. If he's very excited, yes. Oh, just wait, it gets better."

"Better?" Wyatt doubted it. "I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

"Don't you know how to get a man to shut up while in bed, Wyatt? If not, I'll teach you. Or he will. Maybe both of us, if I can figure out how it's done in my head."

He laughed and kissed her neck, in the process having pulled from Glitch. Upon Wyatt's shoulder, Glitch placed his chin, able to view the two of them.

"Are we done? Don't tell me we're done. So much left to explore, Wyatt, I'm ashamed of you."

"No one's done. Least of all me."

Glitch snorted. "I concur."

"Just give her a second. She's figuring something out."

"Aw," Glitch angled, able to see the pale shape of DG, seeming to glow from magic and a paintbrush of the galaxy, "that's my girl. I told you she was adventurous, didn't I? And provocative. Thoughtful, too. And her legs! Have you seen her legs, Wyatt? Of course, you probably have, having had them wrapped around you for the last two hours—"

To quiet him, at least for the moment, Wyatt pummelled Glitch, lips to lips, tongue to tongue.

"I think I got it!" DG exclaimed. Then she sunk back to the pillows. "Wait, no, that won't work." She looked over to see how they had reacted to the vaguest hint, only to look back to the ceiling. "That's all right, you guys have fun. I'll just—wait my turn. What am I saying?" By crawling over Wyatt, she interposed herself, interrupting them. Her back curved to Wyatt's front, and Glitch shimmied close enough to hold a thigh, a knee, a calf that laid over him like a vine.

"Hello, beautiful legs," he said, patting her hip. "Hello, beautiful you." Glitch kissed her for an instant, then her breath was lost in a gasp. Her senses swirled and tipped the suddenly small world, and she drifted back to earth again. "Nothing like having it both ways, I suppose. I wouldn't know what that's like, but I have a suspicion Wyatt does. Can you remember your name, honey? You look—greatly disturbed. Be a little more gentle next time, Wyatt."

"DG? Shut him up. Or I'll crawl over you and do it instead."

Glitch stuck out his tongue. "Is that a promise or a dare? Anyway, I think you hurt her."

"I didn't." But Wyatt suddenly wasn't convinced. She did look mighty small between them, and her shoulder was minuscule beneath his hand. "You all right?"

She laughed and sunk into him, tugging Glitch with her. They collided together, confused by her laughter. Yet they revelled in a moment of like thoughts. But for the collection of their spirits, stolen from their bodies and intertwined in the nothingness of space, they could never be closer.

With a force that might have previously surprised, DG anchored Wyatt into her, and Glitch into her, and let them decide her movements from there.

"I like it here best," she said.


	15. Tempest in a Teapot

15.

**Tempest in a Teapot**

-x-

Promises had been whispered among the burdened breaths of desire, among the willingness to compromise. They said sleep wouldn't be theirs. They said he wouldn't walk out of the house alone. Vows were easy, Wyatt thought. As easy to arrive as to dispute. He kept the desire fuelled and did little to abet compromise. The hours of night went by, and after every restful moment, the peace would fall, heavy among them.

"Are you ready yet?" The last one to ask had been Glitch. Though DG may have liked the space between them best, where she fit, a small figure captured by two chests, they had once again shifted, and Wyatt lay where she had. DG, on his left, half asleep upon his shoulder. And Glitch, wide awake on his other. "They're just out there, waiting, waiting, while we continue with our love spell."

"I like our love spell."

"Why are we whispering?"

"I think she's asleep."

"I'm not asleep! I won't fall asleep! I won't!" To prove the point, DG soared over Wyatt, and eked out a spot upon him. "See, not sleepy. We want to go with you."

Wyatt wasn't sure how she conquered exhaustibility, and she seemed unlikely to be the first to succumb. After another tumble, an exodus to the kitchen for a snack ("I'll eat anything but apples!" she said), and Glitch, alone with Wyatt, passed along his findings.

"You don't want us there. You want to go alone."

"That was the plan. But—DG."

"She's a radical, isn't she? Like the square root of negative one and the interwoven strands of theoretical time. I told you, Wyatt."

"Does anything wear her out?" Wyatt must've said it just in that inherently pathetic tone, accidental, abstruse, for soft lips embraced his, and tantalising squeeze at the ribs as Glitch manoeuvred from the bed.

"I'll see if I can take care of it."

Indeed, he must have. The only audible inclination that Glitch took care of it was the crash of a pan from the kitchen. In time longer than it would've taken to make a very tall sandwich, Glitch returned, DG behind him. Wyatt's oversized robe protected her from the chill downstairs, and the hidden parts of her, seen but now imagined, provoked his imagination momentarily. He was glad for Glitch, who sensed a distraction was required. Wyatt feigned an escape to the bathroom, able to grab suitable attire, scattered about on the floor, as Glitch brought DG to the peak of diversion. He left behind haunting rings of laughter. They were so jovial, so innocent, during the unparalleled mania enveloping them, that pangs of remorse clanked against Wyatt's heart. He stopped, hesitated, stuck between the staircase and the front door. He wanted to return to them, to their comfort, their love, and join in their laughter. But he had to do this first. It was what they had come for.

"Stay," he told Chimtu, on his way to the porch. The wolf licked her nose, ears perked, and watched him, through the screen, walk towards the orchard. She whined plaintively, yelped in the same way, and paced back and forth. The glow of Wyatt's lantern died beyond the copse.

He entered the orchard, a blanket of mist catching the moonlight. The shadows of trees began to stir, and the stillness of night revived in the appearance of ghostly figures.

Wyatt braced. The fire in the lantern brought him light. The echoing laughter, carried in mind and memory, cultivated comfort and galvanised bravery.

-x-

As Glitch sighed out one last trembling breath, he ran his fingertips down the length of DG's thighs. He had a moment to remember that she was just the way he preferred, undressed from the inside out. "I suppose it has something to do with all our furtive copulations. No time for the really important stuff, like getting completely naked. Pah, who needs that…"

"Glitch?" Her rounded, worried eyes, difficult to see in the dark, were a look more of memory than of the moment. Quickly, DG found her waist embraced, and Glitch's pale face confronted her fear.

"He has to go alone, DG. Do you know what happens to things that build up in something that small? Wyatt's heart might explode. I've seen it in you, too, you know. This mighty and small little being that is you, that I'm mightily in love with, that Wyatt loves, too. I've seen you angry, like a tempest in a teapot, and a thousand universes explode. Wyatt will be the same way. We shouldn't interfere."

She protested, clinging the robe tightly around her and ripping a path towards the steps. Glitch called for her, finding what he could in the way of clothes, and chased after the storm.

The storm would not be of rain or magic or a hell divined above the improbable.

She was right, though, and he was wrong. They loved him.

Wyatt needed them.

-x-

"I'm staying."

Wyatt lifted the lantern higher, from direct sight, so that he might have a better visual. All he saw were black shapes secured against translucent slips of silvery moonbeams. Though one figurine, grotesquely disproportioned, every limb too long, shifted and suddenly caught an opaque shaft. Behind it dragged long dark wings, transparent but leaded like glass, sketched and stained in endless shifts of colour, in blacks and whites and lines of spectrums.

He knew it was a she. He even knew who it was—or who it had been. She angled her head, hidden in shadow without a plane to seize light.

"We will have you in the end," she claimed.

"No," Wyatt shook his head and spoke solemnly, proudly, "no, you really won't."

Others around her chattered. She silenced them with a wave of her hand.

"The orchard will stand here forever. And you will stand with it."

"Take back your orchard. I don't want it. I never did. There are people that I love. They love me. You can't take me from them."

The eerie chorus of inharmonious voices rippled across the orchard again, mixed with the sound of stomping feet and a cry of his name. He found one of his arms claimed by DG, and Glitch at the other. Both were horrified by the fairies, what of the oddities could be perceived. Wyatt sensed DG's movement, and held her back at the wrist.

"My fight," he told her, but grasped her hand a moment longer. She relented, or consented, he never knew which, and allowed him to march forward.

"I have already made my decision."

"Your decision is wrong," the voice corrected.

"We'll see about that. So," his lightened tone confused them, and the twitter came again, with DG and Glitch clinging to each other, watching on, "the curse continues as long as you wish it, as long as the orchard remains."

The sibilants quickly turned to hisses. The beings wound a tighter circle to the threatening triumvirate. Still, Wyatt held his ground, and held the lantern high. His eyes glowed in the orange of fire.

"I have a question for all of you. Do you grant each other's wishes?" Wyatt quickly heightened the lantern wick, and the light burned brighter, the fire stronger. "Because, right about now, I think you'd better start wishing the gods make it rain."

In a precise toss, the lantern's glass globe shattered against the trunk of the nearest apple tree. Oil splattered, catching fire as it passed through flame. Stunned as DG was, she calculated that the fire was not moving fast enough. The fairies were edging in, screeching, ferocious— She grabbed Wyatt by the martingale and hauled him back, at the same time thrusting a hand toward the sputtering flames. The arboreal inferno incensed the fairy. In her own temper, sensing the nearness of defeat, she commanded the element—and bid it to overcome all the land they had ever given—and take back the land they had loaned.

In the haze of smoke and flames, in the daze of his memory, Wyatt saw the trees engulfed, a sense of relief. But smoke and fire from the windows of the house pitted him with dread. Someone dragged him across grass and gravel.

"Everyone safe. Rest."

As Wyatt's eyes closed, Raw looked to Meria, hovering over DG and Glitch. She shook her head, silently unsure. But in the darkness beyond her sight Raw saw it there, the indication of vagueness. They were safe from fire, and DG and Glitch might live.

But Wyatt… He had to defeat one curse, and block, too, the blight of death.

Chimtu came and sat against her companion's leg.


	16. Sealed with a Kiss

16.

**Sealed with a Kiss**

-x-

Winter was at its fresh beginning. DG watched the snowy fields pass outside her car window, another mousy chauffeur at the wheel. She loved the glimpse of a meadow between the empty trees, shining like a diamond among a mountainous sea. They captured the vivid strands of her imagination as much as a blank sheet of paper, an untouched canvas. But her fantasies were unbound by then, allowed to roam and be free, in a way they had never been permitted to before.

The comfortable sedan took her along the same curving road it had before. But, unlike all those months ago, there was no man in a red coat waiting in the verge. The automobile drove by the place he had been, and DG, looking back, saw only the ghost of him. She smiled, sinking into the cushions, and allowed her daydreams to plague her, roam through her, and turn the key to her heart once more to the left.

Instead of heading deeper south, the car headed deeper north. She took out a letter from her pocket, fingers sidling across the printed word.

_Three pine trees mark the entrance. You'll see them on the hill. And when you cross beneath their branches, and you will, in the valley you'll see a curl of smoke from a chimney, a little house in the woods… When are you coming? Come quick. There is always the hope of being snowed in._

The letter held a scent she remembered. A wood-burning stove, damp wool set to dry, clean pyjamas of flannel, the smell of a wolf.

And, always, the aroma of apples that once woke her in the morning.

-x-

Sunlight in a northern winter is a pale and fickle creature. It was there in a moment, gone in another. She saw the three pine trees, their limbs covered in fluff, looking like lavender boas in the newness of twilight. The vestige of a pellucid cloud alerted her to the prospect below. A house indeed, two stories of shaped timber and brown-tiled roof. It would've been home to her if it had but one enormous room, a dilapidated cabin housing pigeons in the garret and squirrels in the chimney. What met her surprised, like the old house. Beneath her breast, DG's heart fluttered and skipped.

She was out of the car, armed with the carpetbag, before the car had completely stopped, and far before the door could be opened for her.

Footprints in the snow exposed traces of life. The snow was deep, catching her feet, but she laughed. The frustration was maddening. In the crunch of the white world, DG met an old friend. At once, Chimtu recognised her scent. She frolicked in glee, tossing snow with her snout, yelping and panting and playful. With the ease of her species, Chimtu met DG on the porch, prancing around her in cheerful circle after circle. DG eyed the door, setting her palm flat against it, the new wood, hewn by the hands of love. A house built for her. The movement of adoration filled her.

She glanced back, only for a moment, assured that the automobile had gone. Her knuckles were poised on the threshold, to announce her presence. Then, all at once, she knew she didn't have to.

She let herself in. As per tradition, the wolf went ahead. The door shut the cold from penetrating this perfectly marvellous realm. Scents welcomed her, from the burning wood she'd longed for, to something cooking in the oven, to the smell of lantern oil, and, lastly, the slightest hint of cologne.

The silence was too wonderful for her to break it with a wail. The fall of her feet was enough, if Chimtu bursting into the room failed to speak it first. DG revelled in the moment of ignorance, the moment of confusion as it turned to enlightenment. Glitch was at a desk piled with oversized blank books, perfect for him to fill in deductions of wildlife, any scientific thoughts he might have. He'd written to DG about the new lab, the new work, that it was different than what he ever thought he'd do, but he loved the unpredictability as much as he loved her. He lowered the pen, cracked a knuckle, and gave her all of his gaze. A smile, sweet and tender, captured the attention of the other.

"We were just… writing you a letter," Wyatt said.

"Sealed with a kiss?"

"Is there any other way we'd seal a letter?"

In simultaneous shifts, Wyatt and Glitch drifted to her. At first they vacillated. Would it be awkward? Would it be strange? Would there be a vastness in her that neither of them could fill? It might have been in Wyatt—or somewhere in Glitch. Panic and doubt and insecurity melted into the fabric of forgiveness, into the weave of love. Wyatt stormed to her, embraced her, kissed her so hard she lost her breath, her reason, and clung to him as though he were solid ground. He held her face, forehead to his, blessed the tempting end of her nose, her brow, and again her sweet mouth. Again and again he repeated her name, that she was there—there, there…

"I'm home, Wyatt," she brushed the words against his lips. He tasted the same but he wasn't the same. The orchard had changed him. But she glanced at Glitch just before he took her in his arms, rocked her back and forth, kissed her once, again, and a third time, as he always did, the third time for luck. He wasn't the same, either. Neither was she.

By Wyatt and Glitch, DG was coddled and blessed, hug after hug and kiss after kiss. The orchard could've cursed Wyatt, could've cursed all of them, but its absence had left them bliss.

"I'm not home to stay," DG gulped as tears sprang and dreariness came alive, "but I'll stay as long as I can. They'll get suspicious after a while, but it'll be better once the two of you are married to each other. They'll suspect me less."

"They'll harp on you to get married."

"Already are, Glitch. It's not any different than when you were there, only now it's worsening. But I don't mind." She cuddled against him, aware of Wyatt as he doused lamps, leaving the room in a soft evening glow and a trace of red from the window of the fiery stove. "I'll be content being the crazy maiden aunt to Azkadellia's children, whenever she has any—and she will. And, by that day, with any luck, they'll give me up for hopeless. They never have to know."

Glitch tried to tidy the mess upon his desk, as DG inspected the new place, approving eye given to details here and there.

"You like it?" Wyatt asked.

"It's beautiful. Why'd you turn the lights out? Don't I get a tour?"

Switching off the last of the lamps, Glitch gave a soupy laugh. "Oh, in the morning—in the morning you'll have a tour to end all tours. For now, a much briefer tour. This is the sitting room. Here we—sit. We sit, and we're quite good at it." He grabbed her carpet bag while Wyatt grabbed her elbow.

"This is the hallway." Wyatt pointed to the exposed rafters between plaster. "Glitch actually put that plaster up himself."

"After the first round fell on my head," came the background grumble. "You'd think I'd understand gravity…"

"This is the stairwell. We're planning to hang up photographs and your watercolours eventually. But we just have the one picture so far."

DG didn't have more than a passing glance with the photograph taken at the Ashers Falls Harvest Faire. Their smiling faces, three of them, in a row. Glitch pointed to a shut door, the first on the right upstairs.

"Bathroom. As extravagant as the last."

"We think the tub might actually hold three people," Wyatt declared. "We'll have to test that theory."

"Soon!" added Glitch. "Maybe tomorrow, when all of us are sticky and sore. Sticky and sore if luck holds. Given that we've escaped a massive fire of an orchard and a house, our luck is a grand thing."

He careened beyond Wyatt and filled a black void with dim electrical glow. From DG, Wyatt got a laugh as he scooped her up. Arms wrapped around his neck to hold on. The journey through air lasted briefly, four steps from door to bed. Gently, he set her down. At her side, he knelt and trailed a finger along the curves of her face.

"This is where the tour ends."

"It'll resume tomorrow." Glitch fluffed a couple of pillows on pretence rather than purpose. The proper angle executed, and he held her head at the dip between his legs. Eternity began to feel the threat of the long moment they searched eyes, intentions, souls. "We've been waiting months for this, for the return of you. Let it be winter outside, cold and dank, who cares… You're summer, you're here, you're ours always."

"Ever more." DG tugged suggestively until the plea was answered. He still kissed her as he had annuals before. The tenderness of her thoughts, the play of her memories, Glitch divined.

"When it is summer outside, and winter is forgotten, we'll put a lily in your hair. I want Wyatt to know what you're like when you taste of moonlight and lilies."

Wyatt had become introspective, quiet, observant. She slipped from Glitch and set an ear to Wyatt's chest, to hear it and feel it, the unquestionable promise that he had lived.

"Are you up for this?" DG angled the inquiry to him. The premiere answer was the entanglement of his legs around her, the sweeping wind of his kiss.

"I've been storing up my energy for it." He smiled, and allowed Glitch to spill a favoured explanation.

"He has, too. Oh we've done things, but not with much zeal. It's not because he doesn't love me, and not because I don't love him. It's just—not the same without you."

"Nothing is," DG said. "Let your heart widen a little, and the world changes. Maybe it doesn't really change, but we do."

"I like to think it's the other way."

Behind Wyatt, unbuttoning his shirt at the hem, Glitch chuckled. "Me, too. Wyatt's been thinking about this for weeks, DG. He has it all planned out."

She gave Wyatt a curious, flirtatious grip at the hand, a nibble at the neck. "Has what planned out?"

A strong arm tipped her across him. DG laughed, understanding Wyatt's design. They were on the outside, and she was in her preferred space, the inside, nestled between them. Hands wrestled coverings from her feet, undid buttons of a camisole hidden beneath a sweater, a shirt, and massaged her abdomen as fingers trailed a breast's bottom curve. She lost herself in the passion of breath against her skin, the vibrations of a voice against her body.

"I know just how to unwrap you."

She let him, flaccid and weak-willed, senses heightened to the slightest touch. It was not long before Glitch forced the way of things. Soon, it was Wyatt who could not but hopelessly endure them. They laughed as friends and made love as though bound to each other by the strands of their souls.

"If I fall asleep," DG said drowsily, just as she ascertained dawn's silver crown racing upon the sky, "will I wake to the smell of cooking apples?"

"No," Wyatt cupped her shoulder, pulling her close, and beyond DG's hair he caught Glitch's eye, "no, you won't."

Glitch found Wyatt's palm and kissed it. DG sighed, smiling, a thousand times better than content. No morning would come that she would ever fear. Assured of what would be for all their days, DG permitted her eyes to close, her mind to drift to daydreams.

"I hate apples," Wyatt said, brimmed in facetiousness. They laughed again, spirits renewed, united, uncompromised, forever perdurable.

The orchard had not changed them, but brought them love as a gift. Through it, they had not changed, but they had changed the world.

-x-

end


End file.
